Excerpt
Grandfather was a tree.
Father grew trux, in fifteen colours.
Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them. Around we go, and round…
A house ran amok in Fifteenth Street the day the soldiers of the Emperor Across the River came to Mathembe's township. The sound of the armoured carriers in the streets of Chepsenyt frightened it. Split into its components it was a thing of little intelligence, easily frightened. One of the big, dazzle-painted metal machines had lurched to a halt across the end of Fifteenth Street and the house had panicked. Civilians and soldiers and house units like long hexagonal centipedes, or wheels, or domes on soft-running plastic treads, or concertinas with legs; all running around in the street, the civilians trying to round up the house units, the soldiers trying to round up the civilians.
The Rajavs had wanted to have the house reassembled by night. Now it did not look like they would ever find all the components of their home again. Mathembe shooed away a big, skittering thing like a walking umbrella that was making a dash for the trux pens. It would have alarmed the young organicals, sent them careering into each other, wheels spinning. The Rajavs were moving up to the Proclaimer end of town. Twelve generations had lived and died on Fifteenth Street, now they had packed their lives into five trux and disassembled their house into its components. They had been working since before the edge of the world dipped beneath the sun. Mathembe had been fascinated. She had never seen a house come apart before. Twelve generations, and now they were going. They did not care who knew the reason for their going. Intimidated out of their own homes: Mr Rajav shouted it in the streets for all to hear. Threatening letters, obscene notes, attempts to burn law-abiding citizens out of their own homes. The Ghost Boys. That was who were behind it. The Ghost Boys. Thugs, the lot of them. Louts.
It had not been much of a fire. A half-hearted bomb attack that had left a few scorch marks on the walls, soon cleaned off. Not even worth troubling the police in Timboroa over. Mathembe suspected her younger brother Hradu's involvement. He and Kajree Rajav had been friends until the Word of God had come from the tabernacle and Mr Rajav had forbidden his son to keep company with idolatrous Confessors.
They would go to their own kind, the Rajavs, they would stay not one moment longer among those they had always thought of as friends, always treated as good neighbours, and who all along had wanted them out, wanted their home burned and them dead, wanted the skins of every Proclaimer in Chepsenyt flayed and nailed to their front doors.
And now they were dashing about trying to round up the fleeing, panicked sections of their house.
The armoured carrier turned. Its metal tracks squealed dreadfully on the ceramic cobbles. It came down Fifteenth Street. Mr Rajav shouted at it to go back, go away, but the machine came on, so hard and pressing that the soft contours of the street barely seemed capable of containing it. Standing half out of a hatchway was a soldier in the black uniform of the Emperor Across the River. He was shouting but no one could hear what he was saying because of the people's voices shouting and the din of the engine. No soldier likes to go unnoticed. He swung the big black heavy machine gun on its mount so that it pointed upwards, fired. Five, ten, twenty shots. At the sound of the shots tearing the air apart the people fell silent and still. The pieces of dismembered house ran where they willed while the people listened to what the soldier had to say to them.
The Emperor Across the River required that all citizens of Chepsenyt township in the Prefecture of Timboroa present themselves at the town centre. Forthwith.
All citizens?
All citizens. Forthwith.
