Gaiastan by Grice Troy

Author:Grice, Troy [Grice, Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Indigo and D'naia met again and again after that morning at the bazaar. For him, she was a prize bound up by a knot of silk ribbon. She was something to be unwound… opened.

His desire for her was irrepressible. As time passed, the days away from her became a punishment. He walked his burro from kibbutz to kibbutz, utterly disinterested in his assigned but meaningless tasks, his mind consumed only with her. Even the nausea, brought about by his variants of wrongmindedness, failed to cure him of his longing. It seemed to merely harmonize with and amplify his love sickness.

When his route finally pointed towards her kibbutz, he found himself racing along, dragging his trotting donkey. His pulse quickened as he approached her hovel. When she wasn't home, he would go on to the next stop and then double back later that day. He could not bear to miss her.

The two of them started to sneak off into the woods, together, to be away from everyone. They talked and talked about deeply romantic things like sub-light space travel, caste struggle[18] and virtual immortality.

One autumn getaway, he in his tunic and cape and she in her summer dress wrapped in an overcoat, they found their favorite, secluded place. They were alone, hidden by evergreens and mossy boulders. Their whispers were veiled by the songs of finches. The sun poured through the tree tops and warmed them. And when the words ran out, they embraced each other, and kissed. His hands moved gently down along her curves. She sighed, encouragingly. They moved under her dress, against her warm skin. They pulled off their clothes and they fell together in that hidden place under the brilliant autumn sun.

And though he had been with her, she remained swathed in mystery.

They met again and again this way, flaunting the codex and risking discovery. They went further and further into the woods until, on one rendezvous, bad weather blew in and they were forced to take refuge in an old, abandoned cabin. Their get togethers were raising suspicions but they could not bear to be separated from one another. Eventually, that abandoned cabin became their permanent home.

Life away from the electrical grid and government rations was more difficult than Indigo had envisioned. He found his late autumn days filled with the drudgery of splitting wood and fetching water and hunting and butchering game and gathering mushrooms and wild herbs and the last of the berries that the deer hadn’t plucked. The wood-splitting was definitely the worst of it. The days grew cooler and cooler as the sun rose lower and lower each morning. The nights were cold and quiet, save for the wolves. Then the dusting of nightly frost ceased melting off in the afternoons and the cabin's hearth burned all night and day.

Filling the stove’s relentless hunger for wood consumed the greater portion of Indigo’s dwindling daylight hours. Pine was not as efficient as the compressed cubes of serf-grade coal issued by the officials. Indigo had to feed three double armfuls of wood splits into the stove each day.

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