The Lord of the Plains (16 page)

Chapter 11

Food was important in most cultures, but in
Astar it was treated quite differently to what Aerlid was used
to.

His questions to Keila and Jania were always
circumspect, Astar was supposed to be his home after all. He told
them he had difficulty remembering much of his life from Astar, a
combination of distance in time, a few too many blows to the head
and the trauma associated with being stranded outside the human
lands. Yet he couldn’t quite believe what he was learning and his
questions gradually became more direct.

Where food was concerned you could buy it in
stores, but there were no little shops for eating out, though there
were places where you brought your own food and could cook and
share it with other customers. There was no dish or food native to
Astar, yet surely, he thought, there must be
something
.
Every place had something. Maybe they were fond of their cheese, or
they grew the tastiest tomatoes. Perhaps they made a local soup
that they were proud of. But in Astar food was not to be enjoyed,
it was to be prepared and eaten efficiently. That was all.

This was something Aerlid could not quite
grasp. He’d been looking forward to the food in Astar- the capital
of the human civilization. Just as he failed to understand how the
people of Astar viewed food, Keila and Jania were astonished at his
views. They ended up thinking perhaps he had gone a bit strange in
the head out in the wild.

Money in Astar also surprised him. It was
made out of a very beautiful stone. Stone that he was sure other
people would have adorned their temples, mansions and castles with.
In Astar this pale, blue veined stone was used for money for two
reasons. One, it had no other use to them. They had no temples,
mansions or castles and if they had they certainly wouldn’t have
wasted valuable resources decorating them. Two, it was close and
easy to cut.

When Aerlid and Riley first arrived in Astar
he had wondered about their honour system when it came to buying
food. When you bought little you paid little, when you bought a lot
the price of every item increased substantially. This relied mostly
on the honour system as there were no records of what people
bought, so a person could easily shop in one store then go to
another to avoid the price increase. People who did this were
cheaters. Cheating was something Astarians were very passionate
about. Aerlid had learnt that gemengs who abused the system were
cast out of Astar and that was that, but for humans something
entirely different happened.

Out of curiosity Aerlid visited the store
for humans who cheated. He stayed on the opposite side of the
street, though anyone was allowed to shop there, being seen to do
so was nothing short of social suicide. It was a large building
located far from the city centre and was only one story. The road
in front of it was dirt.

He watched people come and go for some
time.

The prices in that store were uniform.
People who cheated were not allowed to shop anywhere else, and
valuable paper was used to ensure all the stores in the city knew
who was a cheater. So first of all, those who were caught cheating
suddenly had their food expenses rise astronomically. Secondly, as
shopping was a family affair, everyone in the family had to shop at
this place, so not only was the cheater socially ostracized, the
entire family was. The children too, the only way they could escape
the shame was when they moved out or if they married into another
family. If they stayed in their family’s household they would shop
at that store for the rest of their lives, as would their
children.

Cheaters were universally reviled. Friends
would cease all contact with them. Their career would progress no
further than that of a gemeng. They would be lucky not to be beaten
on their way home from work.

The obsession of the humans with resource
use was based on their fear of the gemengs attacking. Every mine
and farm had to be protected from attack. The city had to be
protected. The transportation routes had to be protected. Indeed,
this fear was behind the layout of Astar. In case of attack, there
was a shield that could be deployed around the city. In the case of
the farms, a low grade shield was always deployed. It would mean
starvation if the farms were destroyed, so the energy cost was
deemed worth it. The easiest and most efficient model was a dome,
so that was why all the buildings uniformly rose towards the
centre. Further, this also explained why gemengs lived on the
outskirts. If to save power the shield had to be contracted, the
areas on the edges of the city would be the first to be made
defenceless. In the centre of the city there were many shelters for
the humans. Adult gemengs weren’t allowed in these shelters. If
Astar was attacked, the gemengs were expected to stay outside and
fight.

Aerlid wanted to know if Astar was attacked
regularly. He thought it must be, for this was the number one
concern and interest for all citizens of Astar. He had a surprising
amount of trouble finding the answer. Keila looked at him blankly
when he asked about the last time Astar was attacked. Jania smiled
at him and patted his hand, ‘Not to worry,’ she said, ‘the military
was exceptional. We’ll be quite safe if we’re attacked.’ To know
there had been an attack in Jania’s lifetime was
something,
at least.

Whoever he asked, he always got the same
response. Military personnel jogging in the park looked at him with
hard faces and told him they were equipped to deal with any gemeng
incursion. Children told him Jeitar would save them from
Molzolzor.

He was astonished. In fact it was Riley who
gave him the best answer. She looked around the city and informed
him there were no signs of damage, so if there had been an attack
it had either been unsuccessful or it had not been recent. Further,
from the patterns of deployment of the soldiers it could be
determined an attack was not expected in the
near
future.
Aerlid wanted to know what exactly she knew about patterns of
deployment of soldiers.

‘I thought about it.’ was her response.

Chapter 12

Riley wasn’t nervous. The other children
were nervous as they stood in the line. The gemengs even more so.
Riley was possessed of a remarkable amount of stillness. Stillness
she had learnt from hunting. The other children fidgeted and asked
their friends, ‘are you nervous?’, ‘what do you think she’ll ask?’
and they said, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, depending on how they wanted to look
to their peers, and they said, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘oh I think she’ll
really focus on numbers’ or ‘I don’t think numbers are important’
based mainly on what their hopes and fears were.

‘Are you ready?’ Razra leaned over and
whispered in her ear. He was a bit too close to her ear for her
liking so Riley edged away. When she spoke to him it was in a
whisper (for she learnt to take her cues from the other children),
but she didn’t get close to his ear.

‘Yes.’ she said, then, ‘are you?’

‘Oh for sure! It’ll be easy. What do you
think will be on it?’ he asked hopefully.

‘What we studied in class.’ she replied
evenly.

‘Oh yeah. What else?’

Riley frowned, a line appearing between her
little brows.

Just then Ms Thrope called the first boy in.
The line instantly became tense and quiet. One child put his ear to
the door to listen to what was being said and was instantly yanked
back by another. The other children hissed hushed admonishments at
him, and he was duly chastised.

After maybe ten or fifteen minutes the boy
came out and Ms Thrope called the next one. He grinned at his
friends and walked quietly to the room where the children who had
finished were to play quietly, without giving the questions to
their friends.

So much of human interaction in Astar
depended on the honour system, children were expected to obey it
even at their age.

After almost two hours Riley was called in.
The door was closed behind her. The blackboard was blank, if
something had been written on it before it had been cleaned very
well.

Ms Thrope looked at her levelly. She began
by asking her to solve basic math problems in her head. After that
she was to write some more complicated problems on the board and
solve them. She only had half the board to use, if she wrote poorly
or too big and couldn’t fit all the problems in, well, that was
part of the exam. Afterwards she was asked questions about
geography and told to draw a map on the board. Then she was asked
immersion questions.

Riley may not have gotten everything right,
but she was calm and prompt and when Ms Thrope told her she was
done and to clean the board she did so without worrying about her
mark.

When the exams were finished everyone was
called back into their classroom.

‘Well, now you’ve got your first exam out of
the way.’ Ms Thrope said. ‘I hope you’ve all learned something from
this experience. Now I will call the marks out, understand?’

‘Yes, Ms Thrope.’

Riley did quite well, in fact, Riley was the
best gemeng in the class. Humans who came below her had still done
well on their exams, but were upset anyhow- a gemeng had beaten
them. Everyone knew gemengs were all brawn and no brain.

There was little time left in the year after
exams ended. Though he had resisted, Aerlid’s Seiaan had changed as
Riley’s had. At least, around others. They were trying to fit, and
changing their language was preferable to constantly reminding
people he and Riley were different. In some ways it crept into his
speech even when he was with Riley- Seiaan was not his language
after all, and he had no great love for those people or their
culture.

Whenever Aerlid walked through the city he
looked around for signs of festivals or celebrations. He had some
little hope of it, even after all he had learned about the people
of Astar, surely they had some celebrations? The weather grew
colder and it was time for another visit to the clothes store-
Riley could hardly go to school in her furs.

As the year drew to a close the only change
that Aerlid noticed was that people became more fervent in their
patriotism and frugality, and they talked even more of how they had
come to Astar.

This was not a story taught in schools, it
was just a story every human child knew. The story as told by the
people of Astar was that humans had been forced to live in the
caves due to the strength and violence of the gemengs. Then, 436
years ago, they had built their technology to such a level that
they could come down out of the caves and win some land for
themselves.

Aerlid had doubts about the date for
emerging from the caves.

Though the calendar and hours of the day
were accurate in Astar, for pure efficiency purposes, they didn’t
study history. If the people of Astar recorded their history, it
was somewhere very obscure, so how could they be so sure about how
long they had been out in the world?