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Chapter Seven

Vicky glided across the lawn to the old farmhouse. The ranch-style architecture had been copied from the original family farm when Grandfather Truva settled near Highnam, after fleeing Turkey’s civil war. Bailey and Truvan stood together on the edge of the long veranda. Both brothers, thumbs hooked into their front pockets, looked at their approaching sister.

‘Who’s our guest?’ Bailey almost shouted to Vicky, although she was by then only three metres away. She just smiled and shook her head, eyeing up the matching floppy, brown haircuts.

Truvan stopped nodding and followed up with, ‘Have we finally discovered some husband material?’

Vicky stopped at the first veranda stair and looked up at the twenty-nine-year-old twins. She broadened her smile. This did not so much have the effect of lighting up her face as giving it a backlit glow. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘It’s Jack Smith. Do you remember old Ellie Smith who died last year? He’s her grandson.’

‘Ah, you mean Beautiful Ellie,’ said Truvan, as Bailey looked at him and nodded with a smile.

Bailey continued, ‘Distant Beautiful Ellie. Even at over eighty, she had a… ’ He paused, choosing the right word.

‘Majesty,’ concluded Truvan, and they both stared at the line of poplars at the front end of their land.

Vicky strode up the stairs saying, ‘If I didn’t know you two were gay, I’d swear you’d given something away there.’ The brothers brought their eyes back to her, stood between them. Vicky’s caramel face was only two centimetres lower than their stubbly complexions.

‘He left town though, years ago. To… ’ Again Bailey paused, looking above his sister’s brown hair.

‘Become a sifter,’ Truvan stepped in.

Vicky’s mouth became a tight straight line, and her glow had gone. ‘Yes, he left fourteen years ago.’ It was Vicky’s turn to stare ahead. She looked between her siblings, through the open front door behind them, into darkness. Her hands rested on their little backpacks.

‘A sifter?’ Bailey’s tone was rhetorical.

‘What’s he doing here then? Don’t they have to work every day? I’m sure I remember that they are working on computers for twelve hours every day of their lives. Has he quit?’ Truvan asked with crinkled eyebrows.

‘But sifters never quit.’ Bailey continued to use a loud questioning voice that expected no answer.

‘I don’t know,’ Vicky answered the questions quietly. ‘He’s just as enigmatic now as he was before.’ She pushed on them, turning her brothers like saloon doors as she walked forward past them and into the interior gloom. Now facing each other, the twins made one slow nod in unison.

Inaudible out on the veranda, her words lost in the dim front room, Vicky added, ‘I held his hand the day he left.’

Truvan and Bailey remained on the porch and, discarding their packs, sat down on the veranda sofa. Bailey started tapping on the screen of his armulet, increasingly rapidly and hard. It was working, but would not respond to some of the things he asked it to do. He tried shaking his arm. An armulet’s energy source was the movement of its wearer, this kinetic energy being converted into electricity and stored within the bracelet battery.

Successive generations of armulet technology had reduced power consumption and improved the sensitivity of their radio communication, to such extents that they could be used even when a person was underwater, up a mountain, in a crowd, or an old stone building with thick walls; or even several of these circumstances at once. Scientists had proven that the audiopt feeds were a more accurate record than the visual and auditory perceptions of the actual person involved.

Bailey shook his arm violently. Truvan put his hand out and gripped his brother’s forearm, right over the armulet. ‘They’re offline. All of them.’

*

Two hours later, the sun had set and rain had come, heavy and noisy on the dry ground. Bailey left the veranda sofa, and his brother and father, and went inside. Closing the door behind himself against the noise of the water streaming down outside, he saw Vicky looking in the small mirror beside the downstairs toilet room. She was adjusting her hairband, tucking the odd stray locks away. She finally stretched her cheeks with a large jaw movement and stroked her fingers across the tense skin, turning her head slightly to left and right. Smiling, Vicky then turned to the room and saw her brother, hands on hips, shaking his head.

‘Do you really think you know what you’re doing?’ he asked, pausing briefly before launching on. ‘That guy’s a sifter but he’s not at work. I know the building has been blown up, but surely he should be there waiting for the infotechs to fix the servers. You’re getting yourself involved with a likely terrorist, just when you should be out looking for a husband. You know what a “terrorist” is?’

‘I know,’ she replied quietly, looking straight at Bailey.

‘This farm has been the Truva family estate since the Times of Malthus. Like your ancestors did in Turkey for over 300 years before that, you should be looking to continue the family heritage into the future. Truvan and I clearly will not be producing heirs, so that falls to you. Like it or not, you are the one that holds the family’s history in your grasp. Don’t throw it away casually.’

‘I won’t.’ She was barely audible.

‘You should be looking for a strong, healthy man to start a family with. I remember Jack Smith. That sifter is weak and small. What does he know about growing crops and raising animals?’

Vicky found her voice again. ‘Stop it.’

‘You should be looking for a real man, so this land can support generations of Truva children. Otherwise who will look after you when your back is too old to pull up vegetables, or your eyes can no longer see clearly enough? Father is desperately worried. You will break his heart if you get sucked in by that weakling.’

‘I said stop. You don’t know him.’

‘You are behaving like a spoilt child, thinking you can throw all of this away without a care.’

Vicky lifted her face close to her brother’s and hissed, ‘You are the spoilt child. You are perfectly capable of fathering children, our family is not only down to me. You’re just scared that you’re going to lose control over me.’ She pushed her brother aside and zipped up her raincoat as she stepped out on to the veranda.

Truvan and Marmaran watched from their seats as she strode away without saying a word.