Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  “Where are we?”

  “Near the front,” Luciente said. “We’ve gone up.”

  “Is that why I couldn’t reach you?”

  “Communing’s been harder. Something is interfering. Probability static? Temporal vectors are only primitively grasped … . I tried to reach you before we shipped out, but since then I’ve been too jammed.”

  “Where’s your kenner?” She stared at a band of pale brown skin on Luciente’s left forearm.

  “Back at the foco. We take them off for fear we’ll use them without thinking. They can home on the frequencies. We use these for locator-talkers.” Luciente touched a small netted egg around her neck. “I myself, I confess, I feel naked without my kenner. It’s part of my body. I only take it off to couple or sleep.”

  “Suppose it got lost?”

  “I’d lose two-thirds of my memory … . Marigold at Treefrog had an accident in which both left arm and kenner were destroyed. Arm we could restore but not kenner. Marigold killed perself … . For some it’s only a convenience. For others part of their psyche.”

  Bee came pacing along a trail toward them, carrying a piece of equipment on his back. He looked larger than ever here, and unusually alert. His smile still spoke of luxurious calm and sunny energy. “G’light, Pepper and Salt. I forgot to tell you last time I believe you should trade that wig in on a porcupine.”

  “It’s beginning to grow out. It kind of itches.” On impulse she took off the tipsy reddish brown wig and showed him her crew cut. She could feel a bald spot at the plug of cement, but the rest of her scalp was growing hair straight up.

  Both Bee and Luciente giggled without malice and petted her, exclaiming how stiff and bristly the half-inch hair felt. She did not mind their teasing because it carried affection and besides, she knew how funny she looked. This ward had a real mirror in the bathroom.

  Bee clucked over the plug in her scalp. “This can’t be good. What have they in there?”

  “Something to control me. A machine.”

  Bee looked wasted with sadness, that expression from the beginning of Jackrabbit’s wake. “We’re all at war. You’re a prisoner of war. May you free yourself.” Gently he hugged her.

  She laughed shortly, disentangling herself. “How can I?”

  “Can I give you tactics?” Bee turned her chin back toward him. “There’s always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your cooping. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power.”

  “But you’re still fighting. It isn’t over yet!”

  “How is it ever over?” Luciente waved a hand. “In time the sun goes nova. Big bang. What else? We renew, regenerate. Or die.”

  “But you don’t seem to believe really in more—not more people, more things, or even more money.”

  Luciente leaned against a pine, her fingers playing with the ridged bark. “Someday the gross repair will be done. The oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow clean, the wetlands and the forests flourish. There’ll be no more enemies. No Them and Us. We can quarrel joyously with each other about important matters of idea and art. The vestiges of old ways will fade. I can’t know that time—any more than you can ultimately know us. We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”

  “Do you think I don’t know you, Luciente?”

  “Grasp, as people. I mean you can’t fully comprend our society, any more than I could one a hundred years past us. What new arts will our great-great-grandchildren invent? What old arts discover? What musical instruments will they build? What games? What inknowing? What new foods, what styles of cooking? What sciences we can’t imagine? What new way of healing? Will they sail far into our galaxy? Travel on the submicroscopic strata? When each region is ownfed, when reparations are completed, what then? Sometimes … sometimes I want to live forever!” Luciente flung back her head. “But I know I’ll find my death ripe. I’ll want to lay my body down, I myself, and be done. But now I’d like to travel forward into that future as you traveled to us. I know there’s no real point to it Now suffices. Yet I’m very glad to be knowing you, Connie.”

  A strange high whistling came through the air, nearer and nearer. Bee and Luciente froze; then they motioned to her and began trotting swiftly in the direction Bee had just come from.

  “Fast! Run!” Luciente mouthed at her over her shoulder. Bee dropped back to urge her forward as they ran.

  The high penetrating screech grew louder and louder still. It bored through her ears and seemed to whine round and round in her skull. Pain like a drill sang in her marrow. No longer did the pain seem to enter only through her ears; her bones seemed to vibrate at a pitch too high to bear. She was a tuning fork shivering in pain.

  “Run, Connie! Run!” Bee urged. “Sonic sweeps kill. The reflectors are over the bridge. Run!”

  She tried to keep up, but she could not run as fast. Panting, her sides stabbing, she fell farther and farther behind. They paused to wait Luciente ran back to drag her along. The high drill of the whining shook her. She crumpled to the ground, clawing at her head. “Go on! Save yourself!”

  “There. Her eyelids fluttered. She’s coming out of it”

  She opened her eyes. The nurse stood over her. An aide bustled off with a message.

  “What were you trying to say when you came to?” Nurse Roditis bent close. “Something about going on.”

  “I don’t know.” She closed her eyes.

  “Were you hallucinating?”

  “She doesn’t have a history of hallucination.” Acker was hanging around the foot of her bed.

  “That injection worked. Dr. Morgan will be pleased. But I don’t know what they’re going to do if this keeps happening.” Nurse Roditis sounded stem and judgmental. She made tsk-tsk sounds as she straightened the covers over Connie.

  Luciente gripped her arm, pulling her down into the dugout. Behind decorative-looking screens and small pieces of equipment, some like the one Bee had been carrying on his back, the ground had been scooped out to rock. Her friends were occupying a slight rise over a stream. “Baffles and reflectors,” Luciente explained tersely. “Keep down! They’ll be attacking our line.”

  “Where is everyone?”

  “We’re on the right flank. The line curves to our left, all the way to the river.”

  Otter was cuddled in the dugout next to Connie, examining a bright fallen leaf from one of the maples growing along the stream. Pines stood behind them and a fringe of brilliant maples before. Their red and gold leaves were just starting to fall in drifts on the banks, to float past borne on the rocky stream, to collect in patches of color in eddies and pools.

  “How does this touch you?” Otter asked and read off:

  “One leaf

  webbed gold with fawn

  fluttered to my feet

  and fragile as a dead moth’s wing

  was shattered.”

  She looked at Otter in confusion. Otter was dressed in the same mottled jumpsuit, her hair in two long braids. From her broad nose to her glittering slits of eyes she looked proud of herself. Connie asked, “Is it a code message?”

  “Code? It’s a poem—a cinquain. You don’t like it?”

  “But … how can you write poems about leaves now!”

  Otter’s brows wrinkled. “How not? We’re close to death. Then it’s natural to write poems, no? And we fall like leaves … .”

  “Here they come,” Luciente said calmly, and they all settled into alert poses with their weapons.

  The ground shook violently under her, yet she heard no explosion. In effect, nothing seemed to cause what was happening, yet the ground shook again and she felt sick. Again the ground shook and a tree split and toppled in front of them. Other trees were falling, while a boulder crashed from its perch and rolled fifty feet to lodge in a small basin. Cones pelted them as the birds fled cryin
g terror, the jays shouting Thief, Thief as they flew. To their right someone screamed.

  Then she saw the enemy coming: tall figures entirely encased in seamless metallic uniforms, clanking with heavy metal and wearing helmets that enclosed their heads. They dodged from tree to boulder, from boulder to bush on the other side of the stream.

  “Hold your fire,” Luciente whispered.

  She found she was gripping something like a gun, although it was aimed by peering through a scope and focusing her eyes. Nervously she practiced with it. It responded quickly but she could not quite get the knack of stopping it. She was supposed to lock it in position somehow before she looked away from the target, but she kept stopping it too late.

  More and more metal figures flitted clumsily through the trees, getting ready to attack in force across the water. “Hold your fire,” Luciente whispered again emphatically. “Pick off the ones that get through the barrage.” The she added in the tone of a prayer, “Forgive me, if you are living and I kill you.”

  Bee and Otter mumbled a similar prayer, before Otter whispered, “Do you suppose any of them are people?”

  The troops were massing in the far woods, preparing to break cover. More and more moved up into position. Finally they came clanking out, running pell-mell in waves down the shallow embankment to jump the small stream. Silently they came, except for the clanking of their metal parts. They did not scream or whoop.

  Suddenly she was standing in the living room of the apartment where she had lived with Martin. Hot. Sweat ran down her back and collected under her breasts. The air was so thick and sulfurous she began to cough. She was frightened, her stomach ached with fear. Why? Martin was down there somewhere. Yes, in the street he was barricaded behind turned-over cars, throwing bottles and rocks at the police. The riot police, the TPF, armed with rifles and shotguns and pistols and tear gas canisters and gas grenades, came clanking down the street, stiff and mechanical. But their voices bouncing off the houses were course with the joy of fury: Motherfuckin cocksuckin nigger spics!

  She stood at the window watching, clutching herself across the breasts in her flower print summer dress. Martin was out there somewhere, screaming helpless rage and about to be murdered, as the police gunned down a fourteen-year-old they said had stolen a car, starting this riot. Then one of the police had turned and, seeing her at the window, raised his gun and shot right at her. The window shattered inward. In terror she screamed and fell to the floor among the breaking glass. For two days she had picked bits of glass out of her arms. But he had missed her. They had missed Martin too that time.

  “I think she’s coming to, Doctor.”

  “Patty, did you get hold of Redding? Get on it Find him.”

  “Doctor, his secretary says he’s on the way over.”

  “If we lose this implantation, it won’t look good,” Dr. Morgan muttered. “When did she say he left?”

  “Ten minutes ago, Doctor.”

  “Did she say he was driving straight uptown?”

  “She didn’t say, Doctor.”

  “And you didn’t ask,” he said with sour satisfaction, glad to find somebody to blame for something. “What about Dr. Argent?”

  “I couldn’t get hold of him, Doctor. He’s guest lecturer this morning at Dr. Sanderman’s pathology class. His secretary expects him in his office around eleven-thirty.”

  “She expects! Why doesn’t she trot her … self over there and give him the message. You call her back and tell her to step on it. She can speak to him as soon as he finishes the lecture. These women are too lazy to get off their chairs and stop powdering their noses. You tell her to hand-deliver that message to Argent.”

  Nurse Roditis cleared her throat. “Doctor, should I do something about an operating room downtown?”

  “That has to be Redding’s decision … . Where is he? I bet he stopped with one of those university types for coffee. He drinks coffee all day long, it’s a medical miracle he has kidneys left. I drink it by the gallon when I’m around him. If I keep it up, I’ll end up with ulcers like his. Where the bleeding hell is he?”

  “If you do want to operate, she had breakfast this morning, but she hasn’t taken anything since.” Nurse Roditis popped a thermometer under Connie’s tongue. “Now don’t bite down, that’s a good girl.”

  Hawk gripped the controls of the floater. Luciente hunched poised at the forward weapon and Connie was in the backseat with another weapon, mounted so that it could swivel through one hundred eighty degrees in any plane.

  Hawk was making the floater climb abruptly. They were over the sea, gray waves far below like scales of an enormous fish. The sky was overcast; the puffy bellies of clouds hung over them. They skimmed along just beneath, dodging through fog banks. The floater bobbed corklike in the tides of the air, and she felt a little ill. Hawk looked happy at the controls, singing something Connie remembered hearing before, yes, the night of the feast. She had been walking with Bee, his arm around her. Abruptly her flesh recalled his big warm hand, the thumb gently brushing her breast naked under the flimsy. “How can anybody sing about fighting on such a night?” He had answered her that on such a night people died fighting, as on any other.

  “How good to fight beside you

  friend of our long table,

  mother of my child.”

  Hawk warbled in her high thin voice and the floater banked, dipped, leaped while Connie’s stomach quavered and fell. Sea gulls crossed under them. Fog closed in the horizon. Nothing could be seen but clouds and once in a while another floater bobbing in and out of clouds, as if on an upside-down sea of thick gray air.

  “An army of lovers cannot lose,

  an army of lovers cannot lose!”

  Hawk warbled in her squeaky soprano, cheerful in the closed cabin, and banked the floater right into a cloud that melted around them, shutting off the world till everything was gray cotton fluff and she could not tell up from down. Connie felt dizzy and gripped hard the levers that controlled her sleek weapon.

  Luciente grinned over her shoulder. “Don’t start shooting clouds, sweetness! Relax. Just enjoy the ride! Whee!”

  “Enjoy? My stomach sticks in my teeth! Do we have to scoot along upside down?”

  “We’re like the sea gulls, winging along,” Hawk cried. “How can you not like to fly?”

  “You moved this week, Hawk?” Luciente interrupted tactfully.

  “I turned over my old place to Poppy. It’s kid-sized, the bed and chairs are little. Poppy’s been waiting for space for twomonth. Was planning to go to council for building supplies if something didn’t break soon. But I’m taking Jackrabbit’s old space, and Poppy can take mine.” She swung the floater at a ninety-degree turn and scudded across clear space—a ravine dropping to the sea—into another mass of soft nothing. “My old space is great for a kid. Poppy’s ten. Near enough to the children’s house so you can run over when you want, if you don’t like spending the night alone sometimes. But the floater pad’s handier to where I’m moving. I love the sound of the waters—I’m sorry! You know what it’s like. I’m so sorry,” she sputtered to Luciente.

  “Today we carry on Jackrabbit’s fight.” Luciente made herself busy with her weapon. Luciente was operating the jizer and Connie, in the tail, the scanner.

  “If we survive,” Luciente said conversationally five minutes later, “have you redded what you’ll do now you’re adult? Bee said you’re dreaming on traveling. Will you apprentice yourself?”

  “I’d rather work with floaters than anything. But I want to travel awhile. Never hopped farther than the top of the bay. Thunderbolt and I’ve chewed on taking off for some wandering—after the current phase of the war is over, of course.”

  “How do you know it’ll be over?” Connie asked. “Do you expect to win soon?”

  “Win? It comes in spurts.” Luciente made a face over her shoulder. “Like sun spots.”

  “We thought we’d go south. We figure we have a few useful skills to trade and we can
always stiff it on any passing work. Bolt is a skilled pollinator. I’m a good beginning mechanic. I don’t mean to wander forever, like those puffs. No family, no base. I’d never get to fly. But I want to look around first.”

  “Forty degrees north of east,” Luciente’s voice whipped out. “Two hundred feet lower than present elevation. Dogfight. I count eight objects.”

  Hawk canted about, then lurched off through the gray flab in a direction Connie trusted was north of east Their speed increased till she felt dizzy and scared once again. During the talking she had forgotten to be anxious. None of them spoke now. Hawk was maneuvering sharply. Luciente was checking her own weapon. Then she unbuckled herself, reached over the seat to make a couple of adjustments on the scammer. Then she buckled in again and quickly read their position on the instruments.

  “Almost on them,” she said softly, although of course no one outside could hear them through the cabin walls. “Safeties off. Let’s get them!”

  Their floater lurched free of the clouds and straight into the melee. Four of the floaters were decorated like all the machinery at Mattapoisett The other five (nine, not eight, she counted) were khaki-colored and leaner in construction. Their motors were loud and they left a trail of dark exhaust whenever they climbed.

  Hawk carried them right into the midst of the fracas. The noise deafened her, clutching the scammer. When she saw one of the khaki floaters making at them, she shot the weapon and hoped for the best A bolt of light ribboned out. Hawk kept them twisting, climbing, dipping, she turned upside down and flipped over and came about again till Connie had no idea what was up and what was down. A floater fell in flames into the sea, but she could not tell whose it was. They were fast, supremely maneuverable. It felt like a contest of hummingbirds. It felt like a scrap of dragonflies glinting and humming, turning over and round with their terrible teeth and claws. The floaters were beautiful even in mortal combat. The soft furry bellies of the clouds hung into the fight The cold gray scales of the flank of the sea tipped and angled. Sometimes Hawk brought them so low that Connie could see the foam on the crests of the waves, see the spreading stain where the floater had gone down.