Darcy straightened from the seed-drill,
clapped his gloves together and watched it start up again from where it had
jammed. He pulled the cloth off his head
and face and wiped sweat off his skin.
Not that it helped much. He
coughed hard, and spat, struggling to clear his lungs of dust, looking out over
the pitiless glare shimmering over the marked irrigation. They’d all been hard at it for three days now
and the fields he was responsible for were nearly ready for the lifeweed.
It was such a particular plant that the
wrong amount of water at the wrong time could destroy a whole crop and one crop
of lifeweed lost was worth an entire village’s taxes for the year. His family would be able to afford to send
one of the children to be blessed with knowledge, just with his work here, even
if they could only do a half-year’s crop for his most holy Font of All
Knowledge.
Lifeweed seeds, thankfully, were handled by
the machines. In its mature form, the orange flowers closed up tight and
dropped off the parent plant, if pollinated, the seeds embedded in the gooey
pulp. That was its first mobile stage
because the seed pod would crawl until it ran out of water, generally no more than a metre away, then burst
open releasing the dark purple seeds inside. Each seed had long hooked tendrils
on all sides that always landed with a spike pointing upward so that if it did
not impale a passing foot, the hooks would set even if you only brushed past
them.
They would not sprout if they were not bone
dry for their first year out of the pod and then took two years to develop the
phallic looking stick with a fluff of orange flower on the tip. Darcy had no idea what Himself used the plant
for, but knew that the stems, once they had fruited, were more valuable than
any Illiterate, valuable enough to be worth shipping to another star. At least that’s what Darcy’s father had
taught him, illegally.
The seed drill had a closed drum of tape
with the vicious hooks safely held down, mostly, and the machine fed the tape
through its proboscis, burying the whole line a hand-span under the sand. Darcy walked after the machine, settling his
kerchief back on his head, pulling up the ancient old filter mask that was his
mother’s legacy. This continent was far
hotter and dryer than Xanadu, and his lungs were full of rasping dust. His eyes ran slow tears trying to keep them
clear of grit. The old drill had a loose
spot, actually where the cover on the drum had been worn through and the stray
hooks caught the edge and gummed up the works.
Off in the distance, one of the six-leggers
targeted something with a bang. They
were ranging out in concentric rings away from the first settlement and
fields. Darcy had overheard one of the
Immoderate boys giving his report and he’d referred to the lurking creatures as ‘bush
dragons’ which seemed as good a name as any.
The sun was nearly down far enough, shining
behind the head of the statue of the Font of all Knowledge, for him to take his
break and let Jacky take over tending the drill. His stomach growled, even though the smell of
this dirt, this sand offended his nose.
It stank of something he couldn’t quite put his mind to, but it
certainly didn’t smell like home.
**
*Light and Dark, Two Hundred you are not to
get shot down again! You are going too
close.*
*Acknowledged, Your Radiance. Last data package sent. They are still treating us as dangerous
animals. There seems to be no awareness
of us as equipment. They are not looking
for you.*
*Excellent.
Keep it that way.*
*I have a plan to present, Radiance.*
*A plan?*
*I wish to re-configure into a sand-sheet
form, once I am at their current perimeter and crawl in close under the sand.*
*Have there been any true sand-sheet
encounters?*
*Two.*
*You can risk it.*
*Acknowledged.*
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