They did not.
Dex did their best to look sympathetic, which is what they wanted to be, rather than lost, which is what they were. “I’m sorry,” they said. They scrambled to recall the written advice they’d spent hours consuming, but not only had the specifics evaporated, their basic vocabulary had as well. It was one thing to know people would tell you their troubles. It was another to have an actual flesh-and-blood stranger standing in front of you, weeping profusely as means of introduction, and to know that you—you—were responsible for making this better. “That’s … really sad,” Dex said. They heard the words, heard the tone, heard how utterly pathetic the combination was. They tried to find something wise to say, something insightful, but all that fell out of their mouth was: “Were they a good cat?”
The woman nodded as she pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. “My partner and I got him when he was a kitten. We’d wanted kids, but that didn’t work out, so we got Flip, and—and he’s really the only thing we had in common anymore. People change so much in twenty years, y’know? If we met now, I don’t think we’d have any interest in each other. It’s been a year since we had sex. We both sleep with other people, so I don’t know why we’re holding on to this. Habit, I think. We’ve lived in the same apartment for so long. You know how it goes, you know where home is and where all your things are, and starting over is too scary. But Flip was … I don’t know, the—the last illusion that we were still sharing a life.” She blew her nose. “And now he’s gone, and I just really think—I really think we’re done.”
Dex’s plan had been to dip a toe in. Instead, they were drowning. They blinked, inhaled, and reached for a mug. “Wow,” they said. “That’s … That sounds like a lot.” They cleared their throat and picked up a tin containing a mallowdrop blend. “This one’s good for stress, so, um … would you like that?”
The woman blew her nose again. “Does it have seaberry in it?”
“Uh…” Dex turned the tin over and looked at the ingredient list. “Yes.”
The woman shook her head. “I’m allergic to seaberry.”
“Oh.” Dex turned the other tins over. Seaberry, seaberry, seaberry. Shit. “Here, uh, silver tea. It’s … well, it’s got caffeine in it, so it’s maybe not ideal, but … I mean, any cup of tea is nice, right?”
Dex tried to sound bright, but the way the woman’s eyes drooped said it all. Something shifted on her face. “How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
Dex’s stomach sank. “Well…” They kept their eyes fixed on the measuring scoop, as if it required all their concentration. “To be honest, you’re my first.”
“Your first today, or…”
Dex’s cheeks got hot, and it had nothing to do with the steam from the kettle. “My first.”
“Ah,” the woman said, and the sound of internal confirmation in her voice was devastating. She gave a tight, forced smile. “Silver tea will be fine.” She looked around. “You don’t have anywhere to sit, do you?”
“Oh—” Dex looked from side to side, as if seeing their surroundings for the first time. Gods around, they’d forgotten chairs. “No,” they said.
The woman adjusted her bag. “You know, I’ll just—”
“No, wait, please,” Dex said. They handed her the screaming hot mug—or they started to, but moved so quickly they splashed scalding water on their own hand. “Ow, fuck—I mean, sorry, I—” They scrambled, mopping up the table with the edge of their shirt. “Here, you can have the mug. Keep it. It’s yours.”
The woman picked up the wet mug, and Dex could sense in that moment that the dynamic had flipped—that she was trying to make them feel better. The woman blew across the surface of the drink and took a tentative sip. She moved her tongue around behind expressionless lips. She swallowed as she tried to keep her face from falling, and gave another tight smile. “Thanks,” she said, her disappointment loud and clear.
Dex watched her leave. They sat for a few minutes, staring at nothing.
Piece by piece, they packed up the table.
* * *
Dex could have gone back to Meadow Den at that point. They could’ve walked right back through the door they knew so well and said that on second thought, they could really do with an apprenticeship, and could they have their bunk back, please?
But, oh, how very stupid they’d look.
They’d told Sister Mara they would self-teach. They had their wagon. They knew their god. That would have to be enough.
Dex put trailer to hitch and foot to pedal. The ox-bike responded with an electric boost, its electric motor humming mildly as both machine and rider worked to get the wagon rolling with ease. At last, at last, they left the City.
The relief they felt at seeing open sky was delicious. Plenty of sunlight hit the lower levels of the City, by design, but there was something incomparable about removing buildings from one’s view. The sun had reached its midday peak, and planetrise was just beginning. The familiar crest of Motan’s curve, swirled thick with yellow and white, was barely visible over the Copper Hills. The infrastructural delineation between human space and everything-else space was stark. Road and signage were the only synthetic alterations to the landscape there, and the villages they led to were as neatly corralled as the City itself. This had been the way of things since the Transition, when the people had redivided the surface of their moon. Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature, and the ocean was barely touched at all. It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others. But then, humans had a knack for throwing things out of balance. Finding a limit they’d stick to was victory enough.
In a blink, Dex went from dense urbanity to open field, and the juxtaposition was both startling and welcome. It wasn’t as though they’d never been outside the border walls before. They’d grown up in Haydale, where their family still lived, and visited a couple times a year. The City grew most of its own food in vertical farms and rooftop orchards, but there were some crops that did better with more acreage. The City’s satellite villages—like Haydale—met this need. They weren’t like the country villages Dex was headed to, the modest enclaves established far beyond the City’s pull, but the satellites were still their own independent entity, a sort of transitional species between big and small. Nothing about the meadow road or its surrounding sights was new to Dex, but the context was, and that made all the difference.
As Dex pedaled, they began to develop an inkling of what they needed to do next, a soft bubble of thought far more general direction than concrete plan. As they headed down the road, it occurred to them that there was no reason they couldn’t post up in Haydale while they sorted things out. There’d be a bed for them in the big farmhouse, and a dinner that tasted like childhood, and—Dex began to grimace—their parents and their siblings and their siblings’ kids and their cousins and their cousins’ kids, squabbling the same squabbles they’d been nurturing for decades. There would be barking dogs chasing circles around the noisy kitchen, and the ego-crushing experience of having to explain to their entire sharp-eyed family that this plan they’d laboriously pitched as the right thing to do actually had them feeling quite intimidated after a grand total of one try, and that they now, at the age of twenty-nine, would like very much to return to the safe shelter of their childhood for an indefinite amount of time until they’d figured out just what the hell they were doing.
Oh, how very stupid they’d look.
The first fork in the road came, paired with a sign that read HAYDALE to the right and LITTLE CREEK to the left. Without a second thought or hint of regret, Dex went left.
* * *
Like all the City’s satellites, Little Creek was arranged in a circle. The outer ring was farmland, packed thick with mixed grazing grasses and fruit trees and spring crops, all working in concert to create chemical magic in the soil below. Dex breathed deep as they sailed
past on their bike, relishing the crisp alfalfa, the beeweed, the faint hint of new flowers that would become summer fruit.
Beyond the farmland lay the residential ring, filled with homes that belonged to either single families or multiple ones, depending on preference. A sort of nostalgic fondness filled Dex as they viewed the bulbous cob homes with their glinting accents of colored glass, roofed with either blooming turf or solar panels or both. The sight reminded Dex of Haydale, but Little Creek was decidedly elsewhere. Dex did not know any of the roads there, nor any of the people who waved as bike and wagon zipped past. There was a strange comfort about being in an unfamiliar town not too far from home, where the familiarity was limited to building materials and social customs. It was the ideal mix of getting away yet not standing out.
At the center of the village circle lay Dex’s quarry—the marketplace. They parked both bike and wagon, and began to explore on foot. All sorts of vendors had set up shop in the square, but this market belonged decidedly to the resident farmers. There were endless agrarian delights to be distracted by: wine, bread, honey, raw wool, dyed yarn, fresh bouquets, flower crowns, aquaponic fish and pastured poultry in chests of ice, speckled eggs in cushioned boxes, fruit cordials, leafy greens, festive cakes, seeds for swapping, baskets for carrying, samples for snacking. But despite the temptations, Dex stayed on task, hunting through the marketplace until they found exactly what they were looking for: a booth stuffed with seedlings, marked with an enthusiastic sign.
HERBS! HERBS!
HERBS!!!
Cooking * Brewing * Crafting * Anything!
Dex marched up to the counter, whipped out their pocket computer, entered a large number of pebs, tapped their computer to the vendor’s own to make the transfer, and said, “I’ll take one of each.”
The herb farmer—a man around Dex’s age, with a crooked nose and a clean beard—looked up from the sock he was darning. “Sorry, Sibling, one of…”
“Each,” Dex said. “One of each.” They glanced at the counter, a small framed placard catching their eye. MY FAVORITE REFERENCE GUIDES, the placard read, followed by a library stamp. Dex scanned the stamp with their computer; an icon on the smudged screen indicated the books in question were being downloaded. “Also,” Dex added to the farmer, who was busy gathering one of each, “I need to know where I can get kitchen supplies. And garden supplies.” They thought. “And a sandwich.”
The herb farmer addressed each of these needs in turn, and did so warmly.
There was a traveler’s clearing nestled between the farmland and the residential ring. Dex parked their wagon there, and for three months, that’s where they stayed. They acquired more plants during that time, and more sandwiches, too. They hooked up with the herb farmer on a few occasions, and thanked Allalae for the sweetness of that.
The wagon’s lower deck quickly lost any semblance of organization, evolving rapid-fire into a hodgepodge laboratory. Planters and sunlamps filled every conceivable nook, their leaves and shoots constantly pushing the limits of how far their steward would let them creep. Stacks of used mugs containing the dregs of experiments both promising and pointless teetered on the table, awaiting the moment in which Dex had the brainspace to do the washing-up. A hanging rack took up residence on the ceiling and wasted no time in becoming laden to capacity with bundles of confettied flowers and fragrant leaves drying crisp. A fine dust of ground spices coated everything from the couch to the ladder to the inside of Dex’s nostrils, which regularly set bottles rattling with explosive sneezes. During the sunlight hours, when electrons were plentiful, Dex ran a dehydrator outside, rendering berries and citrus to soft, chewy slivers. It was beside these companionable objects that Dex spent countless hours measuring and muttering, pouring and pacing. They were going to get this right. They had to get this right.
Where the lower deck was frantic, the upper deck was serene. Dex was adamant about not using it for storage, even as the shelves below groaned and Dex’s swearing grew louder each time they walked yet again into a faceful of hanging herbs. The upper deck was, for all intents and purposes, sacred ground. Every night, Dex let their god hear a sigh of thanks as they climbed the ladder and collapsed into the embracing bed. They rarely used the lights up there, preferring instead to slide open the rooftop shade. They fell asleep in starlight, breathing in the muddled snap of a hundred spices, listening to the gurgle of water pumps feeding happy roots in little pots.
Despite these blessings, sometimes Dex could not sleep. In those hours, they frequently asked themself what it was they were doing. They never truly felt like they got a handle on that. They kept doing it all the same.
2
THE BEST TEA MONK IN PANGA
After two years, traveling the quiet highways between Panga’s villages was no longer a matter of mental mapping but of sensory input. Here in the woods of the Inkthorn Pass, Dex knew they were close to the highway’s namesake not because of the signs that said so, but because of the smell: sulfur and minerals, bound together in a slight thickening of humidity. Milky green hot springs came into view a few minutes later, as expected, as well as the smooth white dome of the energy plant standing alongside, exhaling steam through its chimneys. There had been nothing like this in the Shrublands, where Dex had woken up that morning. There, you’d find solar farms built in untended fields, which smelled of sun-warmed scrub and wildflowers. In a week’s time, there’d be yet another transition, as Dex’s route took them back out of the Timberfall and down to the Buckland coast, where the salty air kept wind blades spinning. But for now, Dex would keep company with the scent of the forest. The sulfur of the springs was quickly subsumed by fresh evergreen as Dex pedaled onward, and before long, ground-level buildings like the geothermal plant were few and far between.
A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi. Disturbing these lives through digging was a violence—though sometimes a needed one, as demonstrated by the birds and white skunks who brashly kicked the humus away in necessary pursuit of a full belly. Still, the human residents of this place were judicious about what constituted actual necessity, and as such, disturbed the ground as little as possible. Careful trails were cut, of course, and some objects—cisterns, power junctions, trade vehicles, and so on—had no option but to live full-bodied on the ground. But if you wanted to see the entirety of a Woodland settlement, the direction to look was up.
Dex couldn’t help gazing at the homes suspended from the trunks above the trail, even though they’d seen them many a time. Inkthorn was an especially attractive village, home to some of the most skilled carpenters in the region. The hanging homes here looked akin to shells, cut open to reveal soft geometry. Everything there curved—the rain-shielding roofs, the light-giving windows, the bridges running between like jewelry. The wood was all gathered from unsuitable structures no longer in use, or harvested from trees that had needed nothing more than mud and gravity to bring them down. There was nothing splintered or rough about the lumber, though; Inkthorn’s craftspeople had polished the grain so smooth that from a distance, it looked almost like clay. The village’s practical features were ubiquitous—powered pulleys to bring heavier goods up and down, emergency ladders ready to drop at a moment’s notice, bulbous biogas digesters attached outside kitchen walls—but every home had a unique character, a little whim of the builders. This one had a deck that danced around the house in a spiral, that one had a bubbled skylight, the other had a tree growing through it rather than beside. The homes were like trees themselves in that regard—unmistakably part of a specific visual category, yet each an individual unto itself.
Wagons like Dex’s stood no chance on a hanging bridge, so Dex pedale
d their way to one of the rare cleared areas: the market circle. Sun cascaded through the hole cut in the canopy, creating a bountiful column of light that played pleasingly with the butter-colored paving inlaid with vibrant stones. Dex hadn’t minded the forest chill, but the sudden bloom of warmth felt like the squeeze of a soothing hand against their bare limbs. Allalae was very present there.
Other wagons had already set up shop: a glass vendor from the coast, a tech swapper, someone hawking oils for cooking and vanity and wood. The traders nodded as Dex pedaled in. Dex didn’t know any of them but nodded back all the same. It was a particular nod, the one traders gave each other, even though Dex wasn’t a trader, technically. Their wagon made that fact clear as day.
Dex gave a different sort of nod to the small crowd that was already waiting at the circle’s periphery, a nod that said, hey, I see you, I’ll be ready soon. The first time Dex had encountered waiting people, it had felt stressful, but Dex had quickly learned to not let it trouble them. They entered a space in their mind in which there was an invisible wall between them and their assembly, behind which Dex could work undisturbed. The thing the people wanted took time to prepare. If they wanted it, they could wait.
Dex pulled into an unclaimed spot in the circle, kicked down the ox-bike brakes, and locked the wagon wheels. Unruly hair tumbled into their eyes as they released it from their helmet, hiding the market from view. There was no hope for hair that had been locked in a helmet since dawn, so they tied a headwrap around their scalp and postponed the mess for later. They ducked into the wagon, peeled off their damp shirt, and tossed it into the laundry bag that contained nothing but garments of red and brown. They dusted themself liberally with deodorant powder, fetched a dry shirt from the shrinking stack, and retied the headwrap in respectable symmetry. It would do.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built Page 2