Mother's Hand

Chapter Five

I moved around my house pulling down dust sheets from furniture like tearing away ghosts of the last six years. The could have beens, the things I may have done or people I might have met.

But I am finally home.

By our standards, I would be considered to have a high quality of life. The apartment block I had grown up in was a crumbling old-world heap, with peeling walls and rotting floorboards in the hall. My parents were good people, my mother owned a tech-shop on the Section Two borders and, from what I remember they were the sort of intelligent, quiet type that kept themselves to themselves. With the exception of one conversation with my father, I don't remember catching a whiff of their insubordination.

But Mother obviously did.

I suppose in a way I had tried to honor their memory. Because becoming a vet was the sort of role that allowed you the perks of living outside of Section Two, but under anyone's radar.

Biology is a highly valuable skill, for two reasons; with Mother's arrival we were thrust into a great galactic community with endless biological data to understand and manipulate and, more pressingly; because of the war with the Scynthians.

When Mother landed on this earth hundreds of years ago, the Scynthians and their great Space Dragons were (by her account at least) already tearing through the galaxy. Earth was next on the menu. Their rolling colonialization was unstoppable. Mother was fighting tooth and nail to quell the Scynthian expanse. Henceforth, our whole society, the entirety of humanity was charged with ways to destroy the Scynthians.

As a talented biology student my decision to become a vet and forsake a life of biological warfare or, (as was my suspicion, to perfect our bio-working capabilities) horrified my instructors.

But I followed through and spectacularly failed any exam that would have put me forward to be a biological weapon scientist in Mother's Mind.

So instead, my day job was mostly re-animating people's pets, delivering puppies, and very occasionally being escorted to the agricultural sections to deliver more exotic animals. I don't regret my choice.

Now I think about it. I realize that there was a second reason.

And that was Scynthian Day.

Scynthian Day happens every year. A captured Scynthian is released and the community must gather to kill it using make-shift hand-held weapons. It's a must-attend-on-your-life event and so the streets are packed with families, children and the elderly.

I only know the origins of Scynthian Day because of rumors, and they say that many years ago there were whole sub-groups of war-deniers, those who thought the war against the Scynthians was some kind of hoax and the Scynthians themselves didn't even exist.

So, perhaps as a demonstration, Mother declared Scynthian Day.

Whole communities gathered together around huge mysterious crates that were left in central community squares in a score of our sections.

The first Scynthian Day I remember, was with my parents. I had a scarf wrapped round my neck. Held up in my dad's arms, being the end of December, it was one of those rare cold days where my breath came out in clouds. I remember feeling sad because my parents had insisted, I leave my Purple Monkey behind. We were at the back of the crowd, my parents half-heartedly carrying spears crafted from that year's scrap metal. I had a small knife in my hand. Like a four-year-old with a knife could make a difference!

There was our yearly gift, a great black box dropped in by gravcopter in our community square. I heard great huffing sounds, a threatening click-click-click come from inside. Then a loud bang and the box shook. Everyone was silent and tense, surrounding it.