The Scion of Abacus, Part 1

  Part One

  of

  THE SCION OF ABACUS

  otherwise called

  The Narrative of the Life

  of Toven Bakkis

  a serial novel

  by

  Brondt Kamffer

  * * *

  Copyright 2011 William Brondt Kamffer

  -I-

  My name is Toven Bakkis, and this is my official apology to the world.

  I do not write these things in order that you might think better of me. I write in order that you might think no worse of yourselves. One of our great poets has written:

  The evil that men do lives after them;

  The good is oft interréd with their bones.

  So let it be with me.

  * * *

  The man I became later on in life is invariably the result of the child I was earlier. I grew up, as many of us did, among the Eikos caste of Ilion, the son of a family poorer than most, though happy enough in their delusions.

  There are two tales from my childhood which are especially pertinent and therefore worth sharing. As to understanding them both, it will be helpful if I were to tell you that in those days I was not called Toven Bakkis but rather Toven Aimis, for reasons I shall soon disclose.

  But to the first story: I suppose I was about six years of age at the time. As I recall, my brother Cyn and I were playing in the side streets and alleys where little Eikos were wont to play, far away from the gaze of the fearful and intimidating Synth patrols. As Cyn and I played—I do not recall the game itself, though it is unimportant—I took a tumble and fell face first into a little bush with leaves red as blood and berries of bright crimson.

  I at once drew back in surprise, and Cyn came to my side, clutching at my arms. “It is a hymaberry bush,” he said to me with awe in his voice.

  And so it was. The little bush’s distinctive colors had caused me to think the same. I reached down my hand and plucked the plant from the shallow mud that had gathered in this far corner of the alley where nobody came. In our excitement, Cyn and I ran home, weaving our way past a few inquisitive passers by, though we were unaware at the time of how fortunate we were to live so close to the place where we found the bush.

  We burst in on our mother as she was preparing the evening meal, a poor onion and leek soup that was our usual fare. “Mother, look what we found!” I exclaimed excitedly, and held forth the hymaberry bush like a small trophy.

  Our mother’s face grew ashen pale and her lips quavered.

  She snatched the plant from my grasp and threw it onto the fire. Cyn and I stood aghast, looking from the fireplace, where the red berries and leaves began to burn and crackle, to our mother’s face. She looked on the flames intently, not removing her gaze until the final vestiges of the bush were burnt up.

  Then she turned to us and asked, “Did anyone see you with it?”

  Cyn and I exchanged worried looks, and mother gripped me hard by the shoulders, shaking me. “Did anyone see you with it, Toven?”

  “There were some,” I answered, tears beginning to choke my anxious voice. Had I looked at my brother then, I would have seen him well ahead of me in frightened weeping.

  “Did any Synths see you?” mother asked.

  I could not meet her eyes for the fury in them, but I answered that I did not think any Synth had seen us. She sighed. “Sit down, boys.”

  We sat, and our mother seated herself opposite us. “Listen to me, and listen closely: If you two ever come across another hymaberry bush, I want you to turn around and run as far away as possible. Do you understand me? God did not intend for our kind to touch such things.”

  Cyn nodded, but I asked, “Why, mother? Are they poisonous?” I did not think that they were, but this seemed the only reason in my young mind for our mother’s reaction.

  “Toven, listen to me, you are never to touch the bush again. Never. It is death to any Eikos to do so. If even one Synth had seen you with that bush today, a whole patrol would be knocking down our door even now. They are poisonous, yes, the berries at least, but it is also a death sentence to touch one of the bushes. I don’t know why God made the world the way he did, but we have to live with our place in it. If you find a hymaberry bush again, you come straight home and tell me so your father can report it in the morning. Understand?”

  This time I nodded that I did, but even to my six-year-old mind it seemed a strange thing to execute a man for touching a bush that was poisonous. But then the Eikos are not men, and our lives mean nothing to the Synths who govern us.

  * * *

  The second incident of importance from my childhood had a far greater impact, and a far longer lasting one on my conscious mind. It was really the work of an entire day, Midsummer’s Day in my thirteenth year. Cyn and I had long ago forgotten the incident of the hymaberry bush, and as we never stumbled across another, we had no reason to recall our mother’s warning.

  But the years passed until the thirteenth year of my life. Cyn and I were the same age, though we did not look anything like the other. Cyn was stockier, clearly destined to be a physical man. His dark hair and eyes complemented the skin that was a shade darker than my pink flesh. My straw colored hair and pale grey eyes, coupled with my slight frame, gave me the appearance of a wraith flitting about the city.

  We had always been told we were twins, and we accepted this. But on the morning of Midsummer’s Day, Cyn and I were about to head out to play with the other Eikos our own age when our mother and father called us back into the house.

  Our father was a stern man, not given much to smiling or laughing, and I did not know it at the time but later learnt that this was the case for most Eikos, especially the men who had to eke out a hard life under the charge and whips of their Synth masters. It was our father who began the process of pulling back the veil that hung over our eyes to show us the world as it really was.

  “Boys, you know what today is?”

  “Midsummer’s,” Cyn and I replied in unison.

  “That it is.” I can still see my father’s desperate nod as he said this, as though he summoned great strength to say what must now be said. “Boys, today is Midsummer’s, yes, but it is also the Day of Choosing. Do you know what that means?”

  Cyn and I shook our heads. Father cast mother a worried look, for they both knew long before I did what would happen later that day. But as they loved Cyn and me dearly, they had withheld the information until the last.

  It was our mother who first found the strength to continue. “You boys remember a few years back, you found the hymaberry bush in the alley? Well, on the Day of Choosing, all children in their thirteenth year are presented to the Synths, who will test you to see whether you will climb the ladder to join them or whether you will live your life beneath their feet among the Eikos. The hymaberry is the source of their power, which is why I told you never to touch the bush again should you find one. They guard the plants jealously.”

  “But there is something else you two must know,” our father said. “The test is something every man and woman of Aaria goes through at your age, and less than one in fifty is chosen to join the ranks of the Synths. It is how God has provided for us to rise above the level of animals and become true men if we are worthy. And it is usually the case that brothers and sisters are separated, even twins.”

  Cyn and I looked to each other, vowing in our gazes not to be separated. If one were chosen, the other would follow. It had to be. Such was the certainty of our childish minds.

  Our parents shattered that delusion at once.

  “But you boys are not twins,” our father said. “You are not even brothers.”

  I am not sure which of us was more shocked by those words. Certa
inly, our parents had shown us equal love, and there had never been any suggestion that we were not who they told us we were. But as my parents’ eyes fell on me, I felt my stomach lurch, a feeling I have only felt on two or three occasions since then, a feeling of utter hopelessness.

  “You are not our son by birth, Toven,” said my father, “and before we turn you and Cyn over to the Synths today, it is best that we tell you as much, for your mother and I suspect that you two will be parted. It may be that fate will be kind and that you both will be chosen, but we do not expect it. What we do expect, though, is that you, Toven, will be taken from us.”

  I do not recall whether I wept at that news or looked on it, as boys often do such things, as a grand adventure about to unfold. I do recall, though, my parents weeping, for despite this revelation, they truly did love me and knew, as adults do when children are yet ignorant, what was to come that day.

  My mother said amidst her tears, “We do not know who your true father and mother are or were, Toven, only that your name was chosen by your mother for you, though she refused utterly to tell us the name of your father or her own name.”

  “She came knocking at our door in the dead of night,” our father continued the story, “two nights after Cyn was born. I think she chose us as we were the only family in this neighborhood of Ilion with a newly born, and your mother was but newly-birthed herself. She handed you to us and begged us to raise you as our own. She stayed only so long as it took for us to swear to her we would do so, and then she fled into the night. We never heard from her or saw her again. There were never any inquiries from her father, at least none that we knew of, and so we contented ourselves that she was simply a deranged woman who did not wish to be burdened with a son.”

  As he fell to silence, my mother’s wails cut through the air. Cyn sat rigid beside me, as unable as I to believe what he heard. I asked the only question that made sense to me then, though it was not the sort of question a normal thirteen-year-old boy would ask of his parents at such a time. It isn’t that I did not want to know about my mother, and I regret now not having taken the time to learn what little I could from those I called my parents. But it was, perhaps, indicative of much that was to come in my life.

  I asked them, “Why do you think I will be chosen and Cyn won’t?”

  Our mother wailed again, and our father drew her to himself. He answered, “The hymaberry is poisonous. The only ones able to handle it and to consume its berries are the Synths. It is the source of their power, as you know. That you were not sickened by bearing that bush home to your mother all those years ago suggests you will be chosen, Toven. Clearly, you are immune to its touch and therefore blessed with the ability to access its powers.”

  “But mother held the bush too,” I said, “and she is still here.”

  “She was fortunate. Perhaps she held it in hand so briefly before casting it on the fire that the poison did not transfer to her hands. It is the leaves and berries that are dangerous, I believe. Your mother likely avoided, by luck, touching those.”

  “But I didn’t touch it,” Cyn said defiantly. “Maybe that means I too will be a Synth and Toven and I won’t be parted.”

  “Maybe,” our father said, but I heard no hope in his voice.

  * * *

  Ilion, the first city of the Aarian Dominion, is home to about a million souls, which means there were some fifteen thousand children in the thirteenth year of life in the same summer Cyn and I were presented to the Synths. Fortunately, not all fifteen thousand stood before the same Synths, as we were divided by precinct, and there are over a hundred precincts in the city.

  I do not know whether things in the future shall be as they are now, so for posterity’s sake, I will describe the Choosing as fully as I can recall it. It is likely that in a future day there will be no such thing as the Choosing, for reasons I shall make clear in the course of these confessions. But lest I get ahead of myself, let me just say that my hopes are for a better future, a future free from the shadow I helped perpetuate.

  The Synths were intimidating. Eikos are permitted only to wear browns and pale yellows, but the colors worn by the Synth are wonderfully bright. They are also coded according to their stations in life, for even they are not free of the castes God has created among men, only they are freer than the Eikos, who are dogs.

  The warrior Synths wear green cassocks. I saw many of these on the day Cyn and I were presented to the precinct in Ilion where we would face the trial of the Choosing. I feared them because I knew that they could kill me at any time and for any reason, and they would not be questioned for it. I was a nothing, a less than nothing, and the word of a Synth was the law.

  But we did not come to be tested by the warrior Synths. We came to be tested by the wise Synths, who wear blue cassocks. These men were less fearsome than the warriors, not so burly or angry in their looks, but they struck a different sort of fear into the thirteen-year-olds who came for the Choosing. They were shrewd, and we imagined they could see into our very souls to determine all our dreadful secrets. There were stories that any time an Eikos got it into his head to rebel against God’s perfect system, one of the wise Synths would know almost as soon as the rebellious thought was formed, and he would send a squad of warrior Synths to make the man disappear.

  There are three other castes I suppose I should mention while I’m on the subject, though none of them were there that day Cyn and I stood in the precinct office courtyard. The Hymanni are a special group of Synths who wear white cassocks. They are more powerful than the warrior and wise Synths, but I shall explain that in more detail later on. Then there are the Consuls, who are appointed from among the Hymanni to govern the cities of Aaria; they wear bright red cassocks, and I did not see one of these persons until I was in my twenties, as they deign to speak with anyone who is not of the Hymmani caste at least, and Eikos are like ants to them. Lastly, there is the Hymage himself, draped in a magnificent purple cassock, the wisest of the wise, strongest of the strong, and the magnanimous leader of the Aarian Dominion. If anyone aside from a Consul ever saw him, it was by accident alone, for he very rarely left his mountaintop mansion, which overlooked the city of Ilion like an eagle in the sky eyeing its prey below. He is our great father, and I was fortunate—and doomed—to meet him in time as well.

  Of all the colors men could wear, no one is permitted to wear black, for it is considered an evil color.

  And that is the world as God made it—or as the Synths tell us God made it—and thus Cyn and I were presented to the wise Synths of the seventy-third precinct of Ilion, along with about a hundred-and-forty other boys and girls our own age. As I said, there are over a hundred precincts in the city and about fifteen thousand thirteen-year-olds any given year.

  Our parents took us to the precinct offices at midmorning, and my mother and father hugged me far longer than they did Cyn, for they knew, as I have already said, that I would be chosen this day, and once chosen I would never see them again in all likelihood.

  A burly warrior Synth dragged me from my mother’s arms, threatening to beat her with his baton. She fell to her knees, weeping and pleading for a last kiss, but it was too late by then. I was largely unfazed, apart from the pain in my arm where the iron grip of the Synth held me from running to my pleading mother. Like a fool, I merely waved my hand and smiled as though the adventure was now at last about to begin.

  The warrior Synths lined us up, all one-hundred-and-forty Eikos children, and told us to shut our mouths and quit our wailing. It was likely that only two or three of our number would pass the Choosing at the average rate, so it was useless for us to weep now. Cyn was crying, but I wasn’t. I was too busy praying to God to make sure Cyn was the other one chosen so we could attend the University together, for that is what happens to the chosen. You are taken from your homes and sent to the University of Ilion where other wise Synths and a few select Hymanni turn thirteen-year-old Eikos into other Synths and Hymanni over the course of nine years.
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br />   Now that they had us under control and their threats had quelled the cries of the fearful, two wise Synths approached us, each bearing a crystal bottle and a dropper. Inside the bottles was a liquid red as blood. Though they did not bother to tell a group of thirteen-year-olds what that fluid was, I learnt in later years that it was a drug made from the fruit of the hymaberry bush. This was the source of the Synth power my parents had warned me of. There are all sorts of things I could tell you about this drug, but I will let those revelations wait their proper time in this tale. Suffice it to say, though the Synths did not tell us what they carried in those crystal bottles, it was a drug made of the juiced fruit of the hymaberry plant, commonly referred to simply as “hyma” or “hyma juice.”

  Beginning then at the opposite ends of our line, the wise Synths ordered us one by one to open our mouths and receive a single drop of the red fluid on our tongues.

  As I was near the one end, having clung to my mother longer than most, I was one of the first to taste the drug, but not before I learnt what happened when the body rejected the single drop.

  The first child to my right (I was third in line) opened her mouth to receive her drop. She was shaking visibly, and she snapped her mouth shut the instant she felt the liquid hit her tongue. The wise Synth watched her closely, not moving on to the next child until he was certain she had been chosen or rejected.

  The first sign that something was wrong came as she began to cry all of a sudden. I had only taken one breath after that before she pitched over and began to heave the contents of her stomach onto the ground at the wise Synth’s feet.

  She had not even finished throwing up when a warrior Synth was dragging her off to toss her back into the street. The first rejection.

  I don’t think any of us knew what to expect of the Choosing, but it was clear that few of us expected that. Our parents didn’t talk, didn’t forewarn us of the trial, and it is not such a mystery why when one recalls the awful spectacle the Choosing made.