Twenty one, 17 March
Bibik
Dronikus, a novel set on a burning planet called Earth.
Hotter and drier everywhere
They hiked through the dark and the early sunrise hours, following the river down off the mountain and into the valley, sticking as best they could to the rain forest remnants so as to minimise the risk of being spotted by dronikus.
By mid-morning they had arrived at the edge of agricultural lands at the base of the mountain, marked by rusting boundary fences, drooping power lines and abandoned fields and palm plantations. Not far off they could make out a settlement.
‘That is my village, Apasa,’ Chun pointed. ‘But we’ll stay this side and come to the house through the back.’
Heesh led them alongside a creek that meandered through woods and rock formations. Where they crossed, Zola saw a number of shrines standing in a small glade. ‘Memorials to my family. There, my father and mother…’ Heesh indicated a large stone cairn. ‘Long time gone.’
They passed through a healthy vegetable garden into a yard of fruit orchards bounded by tall forest trees. Alongside these was a group of brick outbuildings. Chun said, ‘these are our workshops.’ Beyond, in the centre of a stand of large trees, stood a fine old house with wide verandas, gables and columns, colonial-style windows, doors and shutters, and high tiled roofs.
‘My other home,’ said Chun.
Bibik, Chun’s aunt, was a small, delicate woman whose beauty and grace had not been diminished by the passing years. Her grandchildren, Chun’s ‘brother-cousins’, served food to the travellers while she prepared another dish at a nearby bench. Around the table, besides Chun’s age-level cousins, were many younger boys and girls, all happily enjoying the luncheon, talking and laughing at once, joking and mocking each other. Bibik asked the travellers about their journey. They recounted the train ride and hiking in the mountains.
The kids stopped chattering to listen as Zola related their hilarious encounter with the man on the train. “‘Show him the sack. What? I said show him the sack”.’ Zola exaggerated his head movements to show that there were two distinct voices, “‘Oh, alright. Would you like to see inside the sack? You see, sir? It’s our collection. Tell him it’s our collection. He can hear. It’s our collection”.’
As the meal came to an end Bibik asked about the incidents on RePO Day. Chun gave a brief, censored version of the massacre.
Bibik said, ‘I know this is not a happy subject, but we must face these terrible things, we can’t just forget them. Please just let us take a moment to remember.’
The table went quiet and most bowed their heads. Zola glanced across at Chesa and Chun. Like him, they both had tears running down their cheeks.
After tea and cake taken on the soft couches on the wide veranda, Bibik said that Chun should organise the beds and rooms with Chesa, while she and Zola would go for a walk. ‘I have some things to show you.’
They were accompanied by a few of the children, walking out past the back of the buildings past the vegetable gardens and into the fields where the remnants of a palm oil plantation stood. Most of the palms were still alive but were stunted and feeble.
‘Y’know, this palm oil, it gave us a nice living for those years,’ said Bibik. ‘Then we got less and less as the hot-hot came. But we didn’t think too much: we believed that everything would come alright, but it never did. It didn’t stop Zola, for months and months and years and years. To this day. Hotter and drier everywhere.’
She pointed randomly around the paddock, ‘my husband, Bobby and I, we replanted but the palms were not happy, and we even brought more water from the rivers but that wasn’t enough. At first they stood up but after that they hung down, like you can see them.’ She dropped her head theatrically onto her chest.
‘But Bobby, his first love was that thing,’ she pointed to the workshops. ‘He was a good man. He was taken by the ‘demic. Not the first one! Not the second one! But the third big one, y’know the one where we had to kill all the dogs? Hey, and that wasn’t even the worst one.’
Zola grimaced in sympathy. He was in exile during the third pandemic but remembered the others, the suffering they caused, with much sadness.
‘Yeah, the third ‘demic took my Bobby, y’know?’ She looked around to see whether the children were within earshot, but they were playing a little way off. ‘I got me a boyfriend a year after he died,’ she said, just above a whisper. ‘He was the “lodger”, the kids thought. He looked after these fields. He was a good farmer but even though we tried hard – very hard, believe me – we couldn’t grow it. Once, we had a good year and got a big crop but then what? hey! we couldn’t sell it. I blamed him, that he was lazy, that he wasn’t trying hard enough at the market, but I was wrong. The government told us that nobody wanted the palm anymore because they had another better oil in other countries now. He left when we could all see it was no use. I was alone again.’
Zola noticed the two older children were flying a drone. Bibik saw him looking and did not skip a beat, ‘they just playing. So clever these children nowadays, huh?’ Zola nodded, clearly not convinced. Bibik registered his expression. ‘No. They’re actually keeping watch. That thing is so good it can see everything. Chuncahaya brought it for us.’
‘What are they watching for?’
‘We had some trouble here, y’know? Like everywhere there is trouble these days,’ Bibik said. ‘Maybe it’s Chuncahaya. I don’t know what she has been up to but I’m sure it is making some people very angry.’
‘What has happened? Have people come here?’
‘Yes, sometimes they come, many of them, with their robots and those things,’ she pointed to the drone. ‘Y’know, they say they can hear signals from our workshop. I tell them they talking shit because there has been nobody working there since… since… a long time. But they don’t believe me, and they go in there and spend hours and hours looking and looking, and they break some things and take some things and then they go. But then some months after and they back and it’s same again.’
‘What’s the workshop, Bibik?’
‘Chuncahaya will show you later. It’s where she… he… where she learned all about those things.’ She stopped and shook her head, ‘she… he… I don’t know why. He is such a beautiful woman. Now these,’ she indicated her breasts, ‘she hides them and makes it look like a man.’ She pressed her large breasts flat against her chest, ‘and who knows what’s happening down there?’ she indicated the pubic area and laughed loudly, ‘I don’t think you can hide that.’
Zola laughed too. He said, ‘but Bibik sometimes, when she or he feels that way, Chun is like that beautiful woman that you know, other times Chun is like a beautiful man.’
Bibik first shook, then nodded her head, ‘yeah, yeah, you’re right.’
She carried on walking, ‘I like his girlfriend. Chesa. She is so good, y’know, she seems to be full of love.’
Zola marvelled at the charm and the insight of this old woman.
‘But you? Tell me about you. Chuncahaya never spoke about you before.’
‘I was away for a long time.’
‘Y’know, there used to be a Zola – he was one of the Pandoke family.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard of him,’ said Zola, he, too, not skipping a beat, ‘they say he was a good man.’ He smiled.
‘He wasn’t like them. And he had a sister. It was all very bad at the end.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Hey, you must have been away for a very long time. Ah, but I think you know the story very well.’
After sunset Chun and heris cousin, Gino, took Zola and Chesa into ‘the workshops’, the brick buildings they had passed when arriving. The floor and every surface were piled high to the ceilings with techno junk, terminals and monitors, ancient computers, old-style telephones, dishes, switchers, routers and relays, and enough cabling to get to the moon and back. Some was trash but most looked to be serviceable. Indeed, it looked like a lot of it was currently in use; at some level, the business was still active.
‘Whoa!’ said Zola, ‘an old techno’s treasure chest.’
‘Uncle Bobby was in the vanguard of those technology years,’ said Chun. ‘Heesh worked away from here in the city for many years, in the big tech companies – I think heesh was even with Pandoke for a while. Heesh learned by watching others and working with them and reading nonstop. Heris mind just took it in. It made sense to herm. Heesh was doing so well but then, over time, heesh started to get worried about the way the technology was being used, y’know, and heesh started to ask questions.’
‘They call him a “troublemaker” at that time,’ said Gino, ‘and start to make problems for him. They put him in the prison even, beat him.’
‘Heesh came back here to grow the palms, but…’ said Chun.
‘Bibik grew the palms; Bobby do this,’ Gino said, gesturing to the workshops.
‘People came from the whole region and at that time the palm was good so they could pay good money, and heesh used the money to build dishes and buy more technology,’ said Chun.
‘But they come, those bastards, from the city and their thugs from here,’ said Gino, indicating the area beyond the village, ‘they come a few times when he was alive, to “check on him”. They just try to scare him and to make trouble, but they never do any big damage. It was only after Chuncahaya leave that they start to cause big problems. They know she is working against them. They’ve try to put in bugs and relays and even use microdronikus but we’re too good at sweeping clean. They come down here – quite a few of them, mean-looking SOBs, y’know, with the rators and the dronikus – looking for her and while they’re about it they bugger-up our equipment. They smash our dishes and what they think is our main server, but we’re building them again now.’
They went through to a large room in which stood rows of work benches. Gino continued, ‘Bobby set this up mainly for teaching. We do repairs and we build stuff at that time, but its main purpose was to teach us, everyone, the villagers, the men and the women, the children.’
‘Most of that is gone now,’ said Chun.
Zola was disappointed to find that Chun and Chesa had allocated him a room on his own at the end of the corridor on the other side of the house. However, it was a comfortable, well-furnished space: a large bed, heavy wooden cupboards, dresser and chairs, fine wall hangings, and thick shutters across the windows. It would probably have been the main bedroom of the house in years gone by. He should feel honoured, he thought, to have been given such a prime room.
In bed he lay back in the dark, his mind full: Bibik, the children, the house, Bobby’s workshops. But soon these were overtaken by other images flooding into his mind: the mountain and the waterhole; the beauty of the cliffs; the sounds and smells of the forest, birdsong, and the insects; Chun and Chesa lying glistening in the sun; his body suspended like a fish in the water. But above and through and around and under it all was the joy of making love with Chesa that filled him, like water running into a glass, to the brim and overflowing. All thoughts of dronikus, the boulevards, the city, had disappeared from his mind.
He was drifting off into sleep when he felt someone enter the room and come to the side of the bed. His heart began to race.
‘Chesa?’ he said, turning expectantly.
‘It’s Chun. Sorry to disturb but…’
‘Where’s Chesa?’
‘Heesh’s getting ready.’
‘Ready?’
‘Yeah, we’ve got to go.’
‘What?’
‘Gino got word that it’s no longer safe for us here. We’re leaving immediately.’
‘How did he find out?’
‘I don’t know. Come, get your stuff. Heesh is waiting for us.’
‘Can we say goodbye to Bibik?’
‘No time. Come Zola, please.’
Dronikus is a novel published in 2023, now being serialised here on Substack. You can read a chapter every week for free.
Liking what you’re reading? Don’t want to wait to see what happens next? You can read the full book now by purchasing a digital or print copy of Dronikus from:
AndAlso Books (print edition)
Amazon (epub), Smashwords (epub), Apple Books (epub), Barnes&Noble (epub)
Note from Marko Newman: Hi Dronikus readers. I hope that you are liking what you are reading. There is still a fair way to go in the story with many twists and turns to come.
For those who are joining the story I highly recommend you take the time to peruse earlier chapters to give you a bit of a lead-in to the story.
I suggest:
Chapters 1 to 3, 7, 9 and 12:
I have a favour to ask all readers: please forward the story (any episode) to anyone who you think may like this short weekly hit of fiction reading. Suggest that if they like it they could subscribe to the weekly post. Emphasise that it is free and that one can unsubscribe with one click.
Also, I’m keen to hear any comments or questions or thoughts you may have. My email is: markonewman@icloud.com
Cheers, Marko