Capella's Golden Eyes Read online

  Capella’s Golden Eyes

  Christopher Evans

  to F.D. Kelsey

  a small token

  and to my mother and father

  with love

  Chapter One

  When we were in junior dorm, Annia, Jax and I used to take the dawn shuttle into Helixport on our free days and go window-shopping along the heat and bustle of Albany Avenue. We always paid freight fare, a token ten checks, and the steward, Naree, would lock us in the hold amongst the crates of oranges, roseplums and nectarines which were in transit to the market in Capitol Square. The hold was cramped and dimly-lit—a single ultraviolet lamp set high on the roof—and we would huddle together, our bodies perspiring, and talk of what we were going to “buy” that morning from the stores which served the rich clientele of the city. Sometimes, if it was very hot, we would discard our clothing and Annia would allow Jax and me to inspect her developing breasts. If we prompted her sufficiently, she would manipulate us both, watching with a completely dispassionate fascination as our ardour grew and finally burst into liquid fruition. The journey seemed endless in those days, and our games helped speed the interminable passage of time.

  Finally we would hear the hiss of escaping air as the shuttle began to decelerate, feel the tug on our stomachs as it dropped earthwards. We would stand, brush the dust from our clothes, and brace ourselves as the craft touched down with a shuddering and a bump. Then there would be further waiting, our hands covering our eyes in anticipation of the flood of sunlight which would mark the opening of the hatch. Naree would be standing there smiling as we scampered down the ramp on to the terminus, the fine city dust blowing about our feet.

  “Don’t be late,” she would call to us, “We leave at sunset.”

  I vividly recall the last of our pilgrimages to the city, on Midseason’s Day in Summer 29. All three of us were past our fifteenth season, approaching our majority ceremonies, and we were aware that this was perhaps the last time we would visit Helixport together. We had jealously hoarded our work-checks over the past six months in order to sample as many of the delights of the city as possible. Albany Avenue was always the starting point for our excursions, its crowded walkways and its shops offering all manner of goods a constant source of fascination to us. Musicians, puppeteers and pastry-vendors plied the street; beggars mingled with the rich; the air was alive with the babble of voices and a variety of different smells. We, three children from the remote and rural High Valleys, were in our element.

  Our first port of call was a small trinket shop on the corner of the avenue where we spent an hour exploring dusty shelves and boxes for any objects that might be of interest to us. I purchased a ten-centimetre object lens for the refractor I was constructing back at the commune; Jax bought a copper snake-ring which was too large for his fingers but fitted snugly on the thumb of his right hand; Annia eventually emerged with a M’threnni gasglobe, a crystal sphere awash with smoky ribbons of red and brown. She held it fondly in her cupped hands and said: “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Jax and I stared at the globe, perplexed. We saw a swirling fog, muddy and bloodstained, lacking form and colour. Annia had often coveted the globes on previous visits, but we had never supposed that she would actually buy one.

  “How much did it cost?” I asked.

  “Fifty checks.”

  “Fifty! You must be mad.”

  Annia laughed and thrust the globe towards us.

  “Feel,” she said. “It’s warm.”

  Jax and I retreated, somewhat in awe of the object. It was rumoured that the globes caused ill-luck if touched by a human hand, and although we were old enough to be scornful of superstitions, we nonetheless felt it wise not to tempt fate.

  “Cowards,” Annia said with a grin, dropping the globe into her belt-pouch.

  “You’re a hybrid,” Jax observed. “Your mother was a M’threnni.”

  “Then why haven’t I got a bald head and funny eyes?”

  “You’ve got your father’s eyes and hair. Or maybe it’s a wig.” He tugged her pony-tail, then frowned: “It could be glued on.”

  “With your flat nose, you look more like a M’threnni.”

  Jax made his arms and legs rigid and opened wide his eyes. He began marching down the walkway in some imagined parody of the aliens’ gait.

  “Halt!” Annia called, hurrying after him, mimicking the brisk officiousness of a militia woman.

  She faced him. “It has come to my attention that you are a M’threnni. What are you doing outside your tower?”

  “I-am-lost,” Jax droned. “Take-me-home.”

  Annia shook his head. “You’ve been out in the sun too long,” she said gravely. “Your skin’s turned black.”

  Jax threw up his hands in horror. “Bring-me-whitewash. I-must-paint-myself.”

  They continued with their banter as we wandered down the avenue. We mocked the aliens, I thought, because we knew so little of them and because we secretly feared them. I did not know, then, that the M’threnni were soon to intrude upon our lives and forever destroy our cosy camaraderie.

  It had grown extremely hot, and the avenue was emptying of people. Capella was approaching zenith and many of the shops had already closed. I watched as the sun-dousers were activated on the façade of a furnishings store, marvelling at the way in which the windows turned grey and opaque in the wink of an eye.

  We retreated into the arcades, those narrow, shadowy streets which branch like tributaries from the main thoroughfare. We stopped at a café and sat in the cooled air, drinking iced lime juice. Ice! We plucked the cubes from our glasses and ran them over our foreheads, across our cheeks, down our necks. The patrons of the café looked on, stern and disapproving. We ignored them.

  It was almost seven hours, and the pools would be opening with the onset of zenith. We left the café and made our way down to the Dome Baths at the southern end of Sussex Street. The vestibule was empty, but as we passed through, dropping our clothes into the numbered bowls, Jax nudged me gently in the ribs with his elbow. A swarthy, overweight youth some seasons older than ourselves stood at the entrance to the pool. He was staring at Annia, assessing her body with a salacious gaze. He looked as if he was about to approach her, but Jax and I hurried forward and led her away into the humid, boisterous air of the pool.

  We had discovered the baths on our first visit to the city three seasons before. While adults sleep or lounge in cafés over the four hours of zenith, the youth of Helixport expend their energies in watersport. At the Dome the lighting is subdued and the water cool and bracing. The three of us clasped hands and ran towards the deep end, plunging in with a splash. I swam off towards the bottom of the pool, down into the blurred, serene silence. I tried to sit on the bottom, flapping my arms frantically against the buoyancy of the water, looking upwards towards the surface, a fluid sky alive with the movement of bodies.

  After we had exhausted ourselves in swimming we lay at the side of the pool, Jax and I assigning breast-sizes to the girls who passed by (the imminence of our majority ceremonies had instilled in us a growing interest in the female form). Annia lay beside us, studying the globules of water on the azure-tiled floor.

  Finally tiring of our sport, Jax and I lay back and closed our eyes. The warm, moist air induced a drowsiness in me; the babble of voices grew distant, a hypnotic undercurrent of sound, I drifted in that twilight zone between true wakefulness and sleep.

  Sometime later, a blunt, nasal voice interrupted my reverie: “Hey, you.”

  I opened my eyes. The fat boy whom Jax had previously pointed out to me was standing in front of Annia, looking down at her. His arms were folded across his chest and I could see the hint of an erection beneath his swimming
trunks.

  “Hey,” he repeated.

  Annia looked up at him, squinting in the dim light.

  “I want you,” he said, his hands jerking on to his waist.

  Annia opened her mouth, but it was Jax’s voice I heard:

  “She’s not going with you.”

  The fat boy peered at Jax. “Oh?” he said. “Who says so?”

  “I do.”

  The boy crouched with surprising swiftness. “Do you say so?” he asked Annia.

  “Yes, I don’t want to go with you.”

  “She’s below majority,” I said.

  Annia glared at me, as if by explaining I had compromised her dignity.

  “A virgin, eh?” the boy said. “That’s even better.”

  “She doesn’t want you,” There was an edge of anger in Jax’s voice. His dark body was tensed, as if he was about to spring to his feet.

  “How would you stop me taking her if I wanted to?”

  “There’s two of us.”

  “Two of you,” the boy said scornfully. “Two kids. Think that’ll be enough?” He straightened, his fists clenched.

  Jax rose slowly and moved between Annia and the boy.

  “Get a steward,” he told her, but she didn’t move.

  Suddenly the fat boy swung at him. Jax ducked, evading the punch, and butted him in the stomach. The fat boy lost his footing on the wet tiles and crashed to the floor. Jax turned away, but before he could register his triumph, from behind a pillar there appeared another boy, his right forearm tattooed with an ornate letter K, who leapt upon him and forced him to the ground.

  I could see that Annia was about to move to Jax’s aid. I sprang forward, grabbed a handful of the boy’s hair, and tugged back his head. In the periphery of my vision I could see the fat boy stumbling to his feet. Before I could turn, he jumped on my back, dragging me away. He was much heavier than me, and, pinning my arms to my chest with one hand, he began hitting me in the face with the other. I writhed and twisted beneath him, avoiding some of his blows, sometimes flinching as red pain blazed across my face. With a great effort I thrust him away and began to rise, but he was already preparing to launch a kick into my face.

  Just then Annia came between us, approaching the boy with her arms limp at her sides and a resigned smile on her face, as if she was offering herself to him. Surprised by this, he paused momentarily, and Annia knotted her right hand and punched him in the testicles. He shrieked with pain and staggered back, bent double. With a gentle push, Annia sent him tumbling into the water.

  I looked around. Jax and the tattooed boy were rolling on the tiles, trading punches. Jax was short but stockily built; what he lacked in seasons he made up for in physical strength and the tattooed boy was finding him difficult to subdue. I was about to add my weight to the struggle when two tall, white-uniformed stewards burst through the crowd of onlookers who had gathered around us.

  We were taken to the office of the pool manager, a bald, muscular man whose physical presence I immediately found intimidating. He sat behind a dark blue polypropylene desk, the deep V of his shirt revealing a chest thickly matted with hair. The stewards seated us on metal stools, Annia, Jax and I to the manager’s right, the two older boys to his left.

  The manager inspected each of us in turn, then rested his elbows on the edge of the desk.

  “Who will speak first?”

  Cautiously we eyed our opponents. The fat boy was still screwed up with pain, his hands covering his crotch, The tattooed boy looked calm and unafraid; he gazed at us with ill-disguised malice.

  The fat boy looked up imploringly at the manager.

  “I’m hurt,” he moaned.

  “Fetch Mauris,” the manager told the steward who was standing at the door. The steward exited.

  “Well, who will speak?”

  “It was not our doing,” Jax said. He indicated the injured boy. “He wanted intercourse with Annia.”

  “And you refused?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “She has not reached majority,” I explained. “We were defending her right to remain inviolate.”

  “You are from the High Valleys?” he asked, correctly assessing our accents.

  “Silver Spring commune,” I told him.

  The tattooed boy murmured inaudibly.

  The manager turned to him. “We have not heard your side of the story.”

  “It was two on to one. Three if you count the girl. I was helping to make it equal odds.”

  “Three on to one? How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “And you?” he asked the fat boy.

  “Eighteen.”

  To us: “And you three are all under majority?”

  “Yes,” said Jax.

  “And you consider that equal odds?” he asked the tattpoed boy.

  “Harri wanted the girl. If she had gone with him there would have been no trouble.”

  “Come here,” the manager said sharply.

  Reluctantly, the boy rose and went over to the desk. The manager’s hand suddenly shot across the desk-top and grabbed his wrist.

  “Now I am many seasons older than you,” he said, squeezing. “How does it feel to be bullied?”

  The boy gritted his teeth but did not reply. The manager squeezed harder, “How does it feel?”

  He was visibly in pain now. “It hurts.”

  The manager released his grip and ordered him to sit down. At this point the steward returned with the doctor who knelt beside the fat boy and removed his hand from the injured area. He slipped his own hand into the fat boy’s shorts and prodded his groin in several places; the fat boy winced and looked up at us in pain and embarrassment.

  “No permanent damage,” the doctor announced. “The pain will ease in a few hours. Try soaking it in cold water.”

  I bit my tongue to stop myself laughing. The doctor left and the manager addressed the steward: “Their birth numbers.”

  The steward took each of us in turn by the right ear, puffing back the lobe to reveal the eight-figured numerals impressed on the underside. These he called out to the manager who duly wrote them down.

  This done, he said to the fat boy: “You are aware that it is illegal to seek intercourse with someone below the age of majority? Was it not explained to you at your own ceremony?”

  The fat boy shrugged but said nothing.

  “I’m aware that youth delights in flaunting tradition,” the manager said. “But not in this establishment. What you do privately is your own business, although I would suggest that you would be better served if you told your warden of your difficulties in finding partners of your own age.”

  “I’ve had plenty my own age,” the fat boy said indignantly. “I thought the girl was toying with me.”

  The manager dismissed this lie with a contemptuous glance.

  “I cannot allow this sort of unruly behaviour at the baths,” he said. “Consequently, you two are hereby banned from all pools in the city for the space of one season. Should subsequent inquiries reveal that you have violated this ban, I will personally make arrangements to have you brought before a sub-adult court on charges of attempted rape.”

  The two boys were obviously stung by the severity of their punishment, for it was exile indeed to be denied access to the pools.

  The manager turned to us. “I am satisfied that on this occasion you three were victims of an unprovoked assault, and therefore I do not propose to penalize you. However, your birth numbers have been noted, and should you be involved in any similar disturbances during the next season then you, too, will suffer the same penalty. Is that clear?”

  We nodded numbly, our sense of victory muted by the conditional nature of our acquittal.

  Released from the baths, we decided that a prudent retreat would be advisable in case the two older boys were harbouring thoughts of revenge. We hurried away down the narrow side-streets, pausing at each turn to ensure that we were not being followed. At length we reached
the river bank and flopped breathless on to a promenade bench. Annia hugged Jax and me, inspecting our battle scars with some relish. Jax’s lower lip was swollen and my left eye was bruised.

  “My brave warriors!” she cried, kissing the tender spots.

  “You struck the fatal blow,” I observed with a grin.

  She laughed. “It will be days before he is able to go chasing girls again.” She hung her arms over our shoulders. “What a team we make!”

  Our exertions had left us hungry and we stopped at a stall and bought pies and bread rolls to supplement the fruit and hard-boiled eggs which we had in our pouches. When our hunger was appeased we wandered down the promenade until we came to a saloon where we knew from past experience the proprietor was no respecter of youth. We took a table in a secluded corner of the forecourt. Annia went inside and presently emerged with a carafe of rice wine. While we drank it, we recounted our experiences at the baths, exaggerating them disgracefully as the wine fired our imaginations. We left the saloon with giddy heads and bright eyes.

  We hired bicycles and rode eastwards, along the river bank. The Tamus was at ebb-tide, broad stretches of glistening black mud being visible on both banks. Here and there a yacht adorned the waters. To our left were the red-roofed villas of the rich which stared grandly out on to the river, ivy dinging to their walls and lush green shrubbery visible through the arched entranceways. Annia was captivated by the villas and I was intrigued by the variety of purely decorative plants in the gardens. In the High Valleys we cultivated only what could be eaten or sold.

  We crossed Estuary Bridge and rode southwards along the old concrete causeway which ran parallel to the shore. Jax had wanted to continue eastwards to the harbour so that he could inspect the trawlerfoils, but Annia and I had indulged his passion for boats on previous occasions and he was outvoted.

  About two kilometres south of the river the causeway veered towards the beach and our path was blocked by the perimeter fence. We dismounted and went down to the fence, thrusting our fingers through the wire-mesh and staring out at the glittering blue-grey ocean. It was a cloudless afternoon and the distant horizon was barely distinguishable from the sky. Two women were wandering along the beach scooping speckled jellyfish into leather sacks with long-handled, flat-bladed instruments. Their activities mystified us; were they attempting to clear the beaches so that they could be opened to the public? It seemed unlikely, for the coastal waters were infested with the creatures and such piecemeal efforts would make no impression whatsoever. There was something furtive about their movements which suggested that their activities were illicit. When their sacks were full, they went down to the water’s edge and launched a small rowing boat. They set off in a southerly direction and were soon lost to sight around the curve of the coast.