“I tried,” Cecily told them. “I did try. But every time I got close …” She paused, and took a deep breath, and tried again. “I’ve never been able to do it easily,” she said, “and this was the first time I ever had to try it with a male. I had something wrong … something left out or misplaced; maybe I had added something that wasn’t supposed to be in a male abdomen. I don’t know what it was, but I couldn’t get resonance.”
Sister Quilla made a tsking sound with her tongue. “There’s no excuse for that, Sister,” she said severely.
“I know.” Cecily looked miserable. Serene, as could be expected of a missionary nun well into middle age, but still miserable.
“Perhaps,” said Naomi, “there is an excuse. Perhaps it was the fault of the patient, for example? Sister Quilla has a tendency to leap to conclusions and to make rude—not to mention unkind—comments based on inadequate evidence. It comes of not being well brought up.” And, she thought, of having no patience with those weaker than herself. Naomi would have to remind Quilla again that not every woman she met had had her early advantages.
“I am so sorry,” Quilla said at once; she was sharp-tongued and severe when she saw fault in someone who should have been doing better, but she had a warm and generous heart. “Naomi has put her finger on the problem with her usual precision; I had no right to say that. I’m sure you feel bad enough about this, Sister Cecily, without my blundering tongue laid on to make it worse—and no doubt, as Naomi says, you have a good reason.”
“No,” said Sister Cecily, shaking her head. “No, I don’t. This is one of those times when there’s no way to sugar coat the unpleasant facts. Ever since the last of our healthies quit on us, I have gotten up every morning and said to myself, ‘Cecily Mara, today you will find time to study the anatomy of the male human being—before you need it. Before it’s too late to refresh your memory!’ And every night I have fallen into my bed regretting that I did not find that time. As Sister Quilla says, I have no excuse.”
“And if we hadn’t just happened to come along, Sister?” Lauren asked.
“Suppose you had not come along,” Cecily answered. “And suppose not one of the three craft whose schedule is in my databanks for this week had come along either.”
“Just suppose.”
“I would have tried again. I would have been terrified of doing irreparable damage, but I would have tried; I wouldn’t have just sat and watched Mr. Jordan die.” She picked up the teapot, discovered that it was empty, and set it down again. “And,” she said, “once I’ve seen you safely off, I will get out my anatomy holos and I will let everything else go until I’ve repaired my deficiencies. My word on it. Please add that to your report to Motherhouse.”
Naomi nodded; she would do that most willingly. But it might not keep Our Lady of the StarTangle from replacing Sister Cecily here on Savannah and sending her somewhere even worse. However busy she was (and no missionary sister alone on a planet was anything but frantically busy), there wasn’t an excuse for letting her grasp of anatomy slip so badly that she couldn’t do basic resonance surgery with ease.
Since everyone present knew all that, she changed the subject. “Sister Cecily,” she said, “some of this I understand, but not the part about ice interfering with takeoffs. We’ve been offplanet nearly ten months. Has something unusual happened?”
“Yes. Something very unusual.” She stood up, picking up the empty teapot. “I’ll make us some more tea,” she said. And, “There’s been no summer. Not anywhere on Earth.”
“We had a bulletin about that,” Quilla said. “But Earth hasn’t had what I would call summer … not real summer … for years. We didn’t pay much attention to the bulletin, I’m afraid.”
“This time,” Cecily told them from her kitchen, “it’s not just that the summer is cooler than it used to be. It’s nearly July, and it’s still deep winter, with no sign of letting up. My sources said they’d intended to stop on Earth for cargo they’d contracted for, and they were warned away. If the report they gave me is accurate, all of Earth is bitter cold, and much of it is under two feet of solid ice.”
This was serious. Naomi’s palms were suddenly cold, as if they, too, had been in ice.
“And you couldn’t get replacements for your healthies from one of the colonies?” she asked, keeping her voice steady. One thing at a time.
Cecily shook her head again. “I asked all over this territory and a good ways beyond,” she said, “and nobody had any working healthies they could let me have. Not right now.”
“They’re all wearing out at once?”
Cecily nodded, tight-lipped, her eyes meeting Naomi’s; the two women were almost exactly the same height. Naomi found it very pleasant not to have to look down at another woman, for once.
“What are people going to do if all the healthies stop working?” asked Lauren. “How are they going to take care of the sick if they don’t have bedside healthies? There are almost no working medpods left, and the few that do work are reserved, every last one, for the government muckamucks.”
Nobody suggested that the women of the Lines would have to take over with resonance medicine; nobody suggested that they would have to open medschools and train people in that skill. Just thinking about it was overwhelming; they were determined not to think about it.
“It will be a while, Sister Lauren,” said Naomi firmly, “before that becomes a problem. They’ll find a way to repair the healthies, before it turns into a crisis. Medpods are a different matter altogether—we have no idea how they work. But healthies, Sister, are only robots.”
And Sister Cecily, sitting down again with the fresh pot of tea, agreed. Surely they could find a way to repair robots.
But they all knew what it meant—everyone’s healthies faltering at the same time. It was called built-in obsolescence. It was against the law now, but when the current generation of the bedside tenders had been built there’d been no safeguards. Terrans would figure out how to build healthies and make them work properly; they weren’t part of the inventory of mystery machines. But there’d be a run on them now, especially this far out.
“Are you going to be able to manage, Sister Cecily?” Naomi asked. “Think before you answer me, please. Because if this is really the famous Icehouse Effect they’ve been predicting on Earth for so many chilly decades, Motherhouse may have trouble getting anyone else out here to help you for a while. They’ll need time to adjust to the conditions you’re describing. If you think it’s necessary, I’ll leave one of my crew here with you as backup.”
“Can you spare her, then?”
“No, I can’t. Every skychapel flies short-staffed; ours is no exception. But we would get by; we’re almost ready to head back home anyway. Don’t try to be noble, Sister! If you can’t handle this post alone, with your supply sources temporarily disrupted in ways none of us understand very well at this moment, you tell me so, and I’ll leave Sister Quilla here to help.”
Sister Cecily sat quietly, obviously thinking hard. Her eyes were heavily shadowed from the strain she’d been under, and the freckles stood out on her cheeks; it was clear that things were not easy on Savannah. But then, things were never easy at a missionary fieldchapel; nobody expected them to be. And after a moment, to Naomi’s relief, the nun said, “No, you don’t have to leave her … much as I admit that I would love it if you did. I can manage. I’ve been promised a healthy from Horsewhispering in a couple of weeks, if I can’t get one anywhere else sooner … they have someone who’ll be recovered enough to do without it by then. You needn’t be worried about me, Sister Naomi. But I thank you for the offer—and for your help. I’m very grateful.”
“You’ll be all right, then?” Naomi observed Cecily closely and carefully, watching for telltale signs of mismatch in her bodyparl. She would be a woman with a habit of saying “I can manage; not to worry,” put on every morning along with the cloth habit that all StarTangle sisters not working underground wore all their lives long. “Are
you absolutely sure?”
“Yes! Yes, of course.” She smiled at them, and the laughter in her eyes was more convincing than her words had been. “I’m really very capable, you know, or they wouldn’t have left me here for twenty-three years all by myself. And I doubt they’ll replace me, even after they see your report. They know my value, and they know I’ll set things right—and nobody else wants a posting to Savannah, I assure you.”
“Hmmph,” said Naomi, and Cecily’s eyebrows went up.
“Hmmph? Why hmmph?”
“I’m not going to recommend that they move you,” said the pilot of Skychapel Six with her official hat on, “but I am going to recommend—in the strongest possible terms—that they send another nun out here to give you a hand. Twenty-three years by yourself, indeed! That’s disgraceful.”
Sister Cecily’s smile deepened, and she chuckled softly; it was a pleasure to feel looked after for a moment, but it was a seduction she was prepared to resist. “I’m fond of the people here, Sister Naomi,” she said, “and they’re fond of me; we’re very close. I’m not alone, after all, or under threat by gangs of thugboys, or facing a plague. Many sisters are not so lucky! I have a relatively peaceful posting, and good companions.”
“You’re saying what’s expected of you, Sister,” Naomi said, her voice stern, and her eyes alert for signals. “I am not impressed. I know there’s no one else from our Order here—is there even one woman of the Lines on Savannah?”
“No. There was one once, long ago, from Shawnessey Household—the first Shawnessey woman I’d ever met, in fact. We had a wonderful few months while she was just down the road. But she didn’t stay. She was needed on some angelforsaken asteroid.”
“Well, then!” said Naomi. “I’m sure the people of Savannah are wonderful human beings and a joy to be near, but it’s not the same. They’re not family, dearlove.”
“And they don’t speak Láadan,” Lauren added, dotting the i.
“It’s kind of you … Your intentions are kind, I mean,” Cecily said earnestly. “But I must tell you: you can’t afford to indulge me right now. Unless the things I’ve been hearing are terribly exaggerated, the troubles on Earth are going to distract Motherchurch from the question of whether I’m lonesome or not for a very long time. I won’t get my hopes up.”
“You think it’s as bad as that?”
“I think it’s as bad as that,” Cecily said, nodding. “I think it is perhaps worse than that. Because the spacegypsies who told me about it consider me a sort of poor-little-thing. I know I don’t look like a poor little thing, but that’s their perception, maybe because after twenty-three years I still live in a bubblehut, with patches. I’m reasonably certain they made a serious effort to understate the problems, to keep me from worrying.”
“When we left …” Naomi paused, and turned to Quilla to nudge her memory. “Quilla, do you remember?”
“I do. It was cold.”
“But no ice.”
“No. No ice. But you know, Naomi, there would come a time, if it just kept getting colder little by little, when suddenly there would be ice. It would be above freezing … and then, quite suddenly, there would be ice. That is the nature of water on Earth.”
“Do you have any clear perception,” Naomi asked the others slowly, thinking that she would have a good deal to say once they were home, about keeping spacechapel crews at least roughly briefed on what went on in the universe, “any clear perception of what it would mean for much of Earth … or even just a substantial portion of the landmass of Earth … to be under two feet of ice? Which has to mean, of course, that there are areas where the ice is even thicker than that?”
They had all read the predictions, in the bulletins and the newspapers and the popmags, year after year. The ones the government had kept saying were alarmist nonsense, even as each successive North American summer was just a little bit colder and the borders of the temperate zone where most crops were raised grew ever closer to one another. A temporary shift in weather patterns, the government had said. Nothing to be alarmed about. Just one more example of media scare tactics and sensationalism. And—in response to warnings from offplanet scientists who were observing the climate from very different vantage points—just one more example of the mischief the colonials delighted in creating for the mother planet they loathed. A mere blip on the chart of weather millennia, the government had insisted; any minute now, we’d be hearing about a Greenhouse Effect heading in the opposite direction.
But although they’d read the figures generated by the models, the women had no clear perception of what an ice-covered planet Earth would be like. It was impossible to imagine it. Impossible to plug the numbers into the imagination and make towns and cities and fields and lakes and mountains, all locked in ice, real in the mind’s eye.
Sister Naomi stood up abruptly, heading for the hut’s tiny kitchen area with the coffeepot and her cup to rinse them. Calling back over her shoulder as she went, “Come on! Quilla, Lauren—we’ll cancel the stops we’ve got left. We’re going home. Now!”
Sister Cecily had never wanted a missionary posting. She’d had her heart set on serving the Order of Our Lady of the StarTangle as a pilot, like Naomi. She had wanted to fly one of the seven skychapels, preferably on the most farflung route. She had trained for that, and she had done well. Too well. When Mother Superior had called her in to tell her the counselors’ decision, she had not pretended otherwise. She had put her hands on Cecily’s shoulders and looked up at her and said, “Sister, you are one of the finest pilot-candidates we’ve ever seen; no question! But your skill is matched by your passion for the task, and for the outermost regions of space. We’ve watched your fiz-status displays when you’re piloting, Sister … the profile approaches that of sexual congress. We can’t encourage that passion.” And then she had put her arms around the stunned young woman and held her close, murmuring that she was sure Cecily understood, and that everyone was deeply sorry.
She had understood it, yes. Bitter as it was, embarrassing as it was to think that the senior sisters knew how her body would react to sexual passion, she had understood it perfectly, and she had not argued. It would not do; of course it would not do. You could not have the ecstasy of faith in competition with the ecstasy of flight.
That had been nearly a quarter century ago, and she had spent most of those years right here, looking out every morning and every evening over these same endless acres of cold, dry wasteland dotted with eucalyptus trees; presumably she would spend the next twenty-five years the same way.
“Mother,” she had said, “could I try again? Someday?”
“Perhaps.” The answer had been dry and crisp, like the cracked ground under her sandals on this bi-April morning. “When you are a very old woman, and less subject to … excesses. Perhaps.”
The man approaching her now as she stood watching the skychapel leave, touching his cheeks with his fingertips in the traditional Savannah greeting-to-an-honored-elder, would have been astonished to learn that she lusted … that was the only accurate word for it … to be a skychapel pilot. Or that she was other than serenely contented with her lot. Even when Cecily had first arrived, only just turned a very naive twenty-four, he had perceived her as someone old and wise and free of all lusts. Cecily had tried to disabuse him of those notions, but then he had been awed by her humility, and that was far worse. The habit and headdress of the StarTangle nuns were carefully designed to evoke such reactions, and were backed up by appropriate body language; it all worked together to overrule many otherwise obvious perceptions.
She understood why it was important always to maintain the distant dignity of the church. Without that distance, its secrets could not have been protected; without that dignity, its nuns could not have lived safely in isolated offworld missionary posts. She did her part to maintain the posture, tolerating no slightest expression of disrespect and no familiarity. But she wished she could have managed to do it without her own person becoming all tangled
up in it; she had a horrified distaste for being revered.
“Best evening, Luke,” she said to the man, her hands safely clasped at her waist so that they wouldn’t accidentally transmit some touch-message she had no intention of sending. “Aren’t you early?”
“Maybe a little early, Sister,” he answered. “I came to the end of the piece I’ve been weaving, and it was too late to set up the loom for a new one this day. When I saw your visitors leave, I thought I’d come on up and speak to you.”
“The sisters came to help with the stomach cancer,” she said. “We’re lucky they were close by.”
“Let’s hope there will be no more emergencies until we can get more healthies; we wouldn’t be that lucky twice, Sister.”
She nodded, feeling the sharp jabs of guilt and knowing she deserved them, and asked, “What was the report, Luke?”
He frowned, and he stared at the ground as if words were written there, but written very faintly, requiring much effort to decipher. Cecily waited, smiling at this old friend encouragingly while he gathered his thoughts and shaped them to his liking.
“Sister Cecily,” he said at last, “there’s no food in the villages. I’m sorry to have to tell you that again; I wish we could do better.” Over their heads the four-inch winterlocusts started up their mournful evening droning, a low, mellow note that would go on until the night was half gone. “I’ve polled everyone by comset, even the ones with infants, and they all say the same: there is no food.”
Cecily had expected it; there hadn’t been any food yesterday either, nor the day before that. There had been some knobby roots—the Savannan equivalent of potatoes—once or twice during the past month, and so far as she knew that was all. It would have made more sense to send someone to let her know when there was food.
“It’s all right, Luke,” she told him. “It doesn’t matter. No doubt the Holy One has good reasons. We’ll have a gathering tonight all the same, my friend—I have three new songs.”
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