Day by day the siblings from the Valley of the Sun clear the top of the hill, chopping our trees down to huge logs and pushing them into post holes. And we stand by and watch.
‘Not so close,’ the olds yell at us Rusty Bus kids, when we’s daring each other to run in and touch one of them tall siblings. We ain’t s’posed to go too close to strangers, all of us kids born and raised here on the Ockery Islands of the inland sea, on account of how strangers can jus’ sneeze and spit diseases into the air all around us and we’ll come out in festering spots and cough our lungs right out of our chests. The old people say they been to see doctors when they was babies and now they’re nokulated and diseases can’t get to them. They do the doctoring if anyone’s sick, and all us kids who ain’t babies and ain’t teenagers, we sleep cosy safe in Rusty Bus so no diseases can get to us.
The siblings don’t have spots, so we keep at our game of dares. Jaguar says he touched one of the sisters, but I was watching and I think he jus’ swiped at her clothes and ran, so I don’t believe him. Now when he says he touched one, I poke him hard in the belly to make him jump and stop his exaggerating.
The olds bring the siblings from the Valley of the Sun food each night, coz ain’t they queens and stuff? Instead of sitting down to eat and take tea like Ockery Islands people do and let old Marta find out more about what they’s doing here, they nod for a thankyou and take the food down to eat, then sleep in their boat.
Each morning, we hope they’ll be gone but they’re back up and building circles from upright logs. Two small circles and one large one, right on top of our hill. Then they stand a huge pole right in the middle of the largest circle and bring something up in a wooden box from the boat. The whole village follow them to watch.
They take from the box this shiny metal square thing and hoist it onto the top of the tall centre pole. One of the sisters scrambles up after it and nails it there. She casts down wires. Then they dig deep pits in the centre of the two smaller circles and drop metal buckets in there and connect them to those wires from the box.
All of us stand and stare. Marta who can speak their language asks them what it is, but they jus’ tell her not to touch any of it or we will die.
Then the siblings from the Valley of the Sun return to their boat and sail away across the inland sea. They’ve been here four days and three nights and everything is changed.
We all stand and stare at the thing on top of the pole. ‘Teknology,’ old Marta calls it. ‘It must do something,’ she says. ‘Spy on us, or make it easy for people to find us, or claim us as part of these islands, or help them talk to people way across the risen sea.’
And none of us think this is good. So we wanna take it down and pull down the wood circles, and try to put everything right by moving young trees to this hilltop. But no one moves, and as the earth turns away from the sun and the dark creeps in on us, the Teknology starts up whirring and flashing a red light and we all run screaming back down the hill to our huts and Rusty Bus.
