Seeder, Chapter Five

5. False Indigo

5. False Indigo

Professor Khaled Mahad sips weak coffee on a balcony in North Wedge, marveling at the unfiltered sun and the unwavering azure sky. He’s been away too long. He wouldn’t have set foot in North Wedge when he was a kid, for fear of being picked up by the community patrols. The house they’re in belongs to his wife Halimah’s brother, Markoe, a doctor who tends the Urizen family when the dynastic train passes through Belovode. The house has lawns in front and back, and room inside to house him and Halimah and both kids, in addition to Markoe’s wife and three daughters. Khaled doesn’t think of himself as someone who craves space. The two-bedroom apartment in Mirror where he grew up housed his family and another: five kids in the larger bedroom. From there he moved into the cell-like dorm that came with his scholarship to Kitezh. Even though the city is underwater, having a room to himself made him feel like gentry. Sometimes he would lie on the floor, arms and legs splayed like a starfish and enjoy the pleasure of not being jostled or stepped on. After a lighting fixture fell from the upper dome and crashed into the building where she lived, he and Halimah shared that dorm room. Khaled moved his twin bed — which they shared enough nights it was already “theirs” — to the middle of the room so they could set up desks in opposite corners. They barely slept in those months anyway, unless passing out at library carrolls counted as sleep. She finished her dissertation before he did, which surprised no one, and took a tenure-track position in the classics department. Her first check showed up two days after they learned she was pregnant. They bought a rowhouse on the far side of the same dorm complex, bigger but farther from campus and thus affordable, where they’ve lived for as long as Salma’s been alive. Zayan was born in the living room, under the watch of midwives and Halimah’s mother, who broke her promise to never visit Kitezh only that one time and fled for the surface a week after her grandson’s birth.

Looking out over the front lawn, across the street to neighbors who wouldn’t hear if he shouted to them, Khaled wishes he could give his kids space like this. He wonders how Halimah grew up in North Wedge and left. What are libraries and colleagues and even tenure against space? He wonders if the reason he’s struggling to finish his book isn’t the kids, or the course load, but the impossibility of writing about the teachings of the Gardeners when he lives without a patch of land to grow on, the light filtered through the hundred feet of water the dome holds back. If that were true, he’d expect to find adherents to Gardenerism in lush neighborhoods like these, where peony and queen of night tulips are cultivated as status symbols. Instead, he’s here to meet a contact from the artists’ squats in West Flat, not as greenless as Mirror, but not a neighborhood that affords space for botany beyond sprays of grass coming up through the sidewalks or tufting bare girders of abandonedconstruction projects. He hopes he’ll find the missing element to his work here, going off rumors and secondhand information. Gardenerism is acceptable for academic study, part of the philosophical history of Lod, but its practice is illegal. Printed copies of The Aphorisms are samizdat in Belovode; Khaled has paperwork permitting him to carry his copy from the libraries at Kitezh. He sold Halimah on the trip as a vacation, but even she asked what he expected to find. “The flower can’t pollinate itself,” he said. “It needs the intervention and grace of the bee.” In her eyes, he saw how close he’d come to the end of her patience. “One afternoon,” he said. “I meet with a couple people, take some notes. The rest of the time, I’m with you.”

“You’re never with me,” she said. If they were in a play, the line would have been delivered after his exit, alone on an empty stage, addressed to the audience. Although he hadn’t intended it when he spoke it, he resolved to make the promise true. Other promises piled fast upon. When we get back, I’ll finish the book and fuck it if it isn’t any good. The best book is the one that’s done. I’ll spend time with the kids, not just letting them bang toys together on the floor of my office while I work. I’ll be here, present. I’ll become a person I can stand to live with.

He knew he was failing as soon as the train entered Belovode. The Cross-Lod Line began in Kitezh, underneath Lake Baikai, and emerged from the surface to speed across the eastern plains. Two hours out, they saw a tribe of Goredeti auroch-riders, men and women, thirty in all, wearing their thick hide coats, astride cattle tall to the shoulder as a man. When the riders saw the train, they fell into formation, running the animals in three interlinked lemniscates on the flat grass of the plain. Zayan clapped delightedly, and Salma noted that the riders had no saddles or reins. “They drum on the horns with their fingers,” Halimah explained. “Each child is paired with the auroch born most immediately after themselves. They’re raised together from infancy. An auroch will die for its rider, and vice versa.” Halimah smiled at Khaled. Her dissertation was on ancient Goredeti poetry, women comparing their mates, favorably or not, to cattle.

The next morning, they were in the wheat fields of Zavolzhye, where the Gardener known as Arcadia was born and raised. These were factory farms, endless parallel rows of wheat, the soil saturated with pesticide and enriched auroch shit, spider-like metal threshers creeping along the lines. In Arcadia’s writings, he describes wandering from the farmhouse drunk one night and encountering a dormant thresher in the field as if it were an alien thing, an invader.

I belonged there, and there belonged there, but it did not belong there.

Khaled stopped himself from recounting the scene to Halimah and the kids.
On the fourth day, they entered Belovode through the eastern gap in Crown and into Last East, the city’s breadbasket. “Look at that,” he said to no one, then tapped Salma as if he’d been talking to her. “Remember when we passed the Zavolzhye fields, ordered rows to let the threshers through? These are chaos. It’s do-nothing farming, following Arcadian writing no one in the city should have access to. What do you think of that?”

Salma looked at him, confused. “It’s great, dad.”

Halimah gathered up the kids. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a snack while your father looks at wheat.”

He can’t say it’s gotten better. At least Halimah has family to distract her. Markoe is away most of the time, and his wife has latches on to Halimah like a life preserver. Their girls kids are brats, but Salma and Zayan are happy to run around outside, even if their cousin’s games involve getting Salma to hide without any intention of looking for her, or finding new ways to trip Zayan. Khaled is trying to be present, but he makes constant mental notes of potential interview questions. At dinner, while Markoe details the trappings and amenities on the dynastic train, Khaled uses the time to catalog what he knows about augmented seedcraft and its applications, until he realizes the entire table is looking at him.

“He asked if we’d like a tour of the train, Khaled,” Halimah says, looking angrily at her plate.

“Oh,” says Khaled. “Not really. It’s a little outside my scope.”

“We’re all a little outside Khaled’s scope,” Halimah explains to the table, and while Markoe and his wife laugh it off, Khaled sees the sentiment hit Salma. Be better, he curses himself, but the admonishment morphs into an aphorism about the sweetness of the apple increasing from one generation to the next and he is makes a mental note to speak to the vendors in the farmers markets in Burn Bright, if he can find a rickshaw to take him there. His research plans amount to more than the afternoon he promised to spend, but when will he be here again? Even as he knows he’s losing them, he can’t help thinking of his family as hardy cacti that don’t need tending. Tomorrow I’ll have them, he thinks, but all this will be lost to me.

Salma finds him on the balcony. She sits crosslegged at his feet, a habit since she was little, as if she’s trying to highlight the distance between them. Not highlight, he thinks, assess. This is his daughter: assessor of situations. Her mind works differently from his or Halimah’s. Halimah thinks synthetically, seeing patterns emerge out of a hundred of years of poetry. Khaled deconstructs, breaking things into their constituent parts until he finds the core contradiction they contain, the seam along which the seedcoat cracks. Salma creates moments and places, and her observations are shockingly quick and perceptive.

“This isn’t the city, really,” she says. She peers between the wrought iron bars at the fresh-trimmed lawn.

“Everything inside the Crown wall is Belovode,” he says. He takes a sip of coffee. “Technically.”

Salma smirks. His last word confirms her judgment. “I don’t want to see the king’s train,” she says.

“You don’t have to go,” Khaled says. “Your mother can take you into Belovode proper. A nice restaurant, or a play.”

“I’ve seen plays back home,” she says.

Khaled nods. “They’re different here,” he says. “Sometimes less than a century old. People dress like real people instead of the third dynasty. They talk normal; no thees and thous.”

She chuckles. “Fart jokes?”

“Some fart jokes,” he says. “And the musicians sing, real words. Sometimes words you’re not allowed to say. By the time I was your age, I knew a dozen swear words you’ve never heard.”

“Teach me?”

“When you’re older,” he says, grinning. “Your mother would kill me.”

“Why does she have to take us to the city?” Salma asks. “Why can’t you?”

“I’ll be no fun,” he says. “I’m doing research, all day.” And tomorrow, if I can get out to Burn Bright, he thinks. And maybe Markoe knows someone in Last East who could talk me through pest control practices.

“I want to go with you,” says Salma. She doesn’t whine her requests the way her brother often does; she states her desires. “I can help. I can take notes.”

“The people I’m talking to aren’t safe to be around,” he says.

“I’m fucking tired of being safe,” she says.

Khaled draws back, trying to pass his shock off as comically exaggerated. He doesn’t want her to know she’s found a way to transgress; it’ll ensure she does it again, louder.

“You’ll fit right in here,” he says. “A city girl born. Little Belovodi.”

Salma beams.