by Molly Gloss
The daylights had been extinguished. In the narrow lanes between the houses, light fell out of casements and made the air visible, but in the farmed land the darkness was whole, uncompromised. Humberto went ahead of Ĉejo, finding the way carefully on the beaten tracks. He was silent. Only when they had got at the edge of the Alaŭdo ŝiro he said suddenly, murmuring, “Is there soul in a plant, do you think? Why do you suppose we honor the food by a silent grace?” with the end of it dropping so it became less a question. He had a habit of doing this, brooding on small mysteries, but when Ĉejo looked at him he looked back squinting, as if he were surprised to have asked it, and he said quickly, “I don’t know,” as if it might have been his own answer, or the unfinished beginning of something. Then he put his hand to the back of his head and ruffled his own hair fiercely. In a moment he began to lay out the next day’s work tying up the ĉejote vines, harvesting leaves and flower buds from some of the doan gwa melons, repairing the runoff piping under a bed of radishes and en-kai, and it wasn’t as if he had asked Ĉejo anything.
Ĉejo’s grandmother and her friend Heza Barfor sat together under the lamp in the front room of the apartment. Leona sat against a repozo with both her feet extended in front of her. She was a little lame from an old accident, a bone broken when a pipe had fallen on her; she was a sewage engineer. Her lap was full of milkweed and she was picking it clean with swift skill, the seeds raining in her bowl with a tiny, steady patter. Heza sat on her hips and heels on a cushion and knitted.
“She is only a couple of years older than us,” Heza was saying, “but look at the difference. If she wasn’t so cross-grained, I ought to feel sorry for her.”
Since Heza had come to live in Leona’s house, she had complained ceaselessly about her sister-in-law, using always the indefinite “she,” as if the woman’s name was a sour fruit she didn’t want in her mouth. Ĉejo didn’t know the sister-in-law, and had got swiftly tired of Heza’s complaining. If his grandmother was tired of it, she didn’t say; she would listen and nod while Heza let her bitterness stream out. Leona’s tolerance was storied.
She lifted her head to Ĉejo and Humberto and said over Heza’s complaint, “Do you know? a sail mender was killed today, but I heard it wasn’t Juko, eh?” Her eyes narrowed, looking at them.
Ĉejo’s father crouched down on the floor beside her and busied his hands with the milkweed. “It was Alberto Poreda, panja. It was Juko who brought in the body.” He glanced at his mother. “We went to her house and stayed a while. We ate our supper with Juko and Kristina Veberes.”
Leona looked away. “Well, Juko takes a death without much trouble, eh?” She had a long-standing bitterness toward Juko, and her bottom lip curled on it.
These were matters that weren’t spoken of except left-handedly, but Ĉejo understood that the anger between his mother and his grandmother had to do with Vilef’s death, which had also been the beginning of the end of his parents’ marriage, and not an occasion for Leona’s tolerance. Because no one had told him an unambiguous account, Ĉejo had no position, and tried to hold back every malign outbreak. “My mother has an old friendship with Al Poreda,” he said in defense of his mother, and then, “She was crying, eh?” because his grandmother was prone to complain of Juko’s insufficient tears. Leona looked sideward at her son but not at Ĉejo, and did not speak. In a moment, Ĉejo deliberately sat down at his loom and took up the half-finished stringing of the warp on his warping board.
His grandfather wandered into the apartment with a handful of figs in his hand. He said, with his mouth chewing, “I heard somebody killed himself on the sail. Was that it? The ŝimanas?”
Leona said without bitterness, “If he was a religious man, God knows where his faith was when he let this happen.”
“It’s not so easy as that,” Humberto said to her, but he made no effort to untangle it.
“Nothing, not even God, is greater to a person than their own self is.” Heza pronounced these words solemnly without lifting her eyes from her knitting needles. All of them looked at her. Heza had a well known habit of stating things without seeming to connect them to what other people were saying. Ĉejo wasn’t sure if her declaration had anything at all to do with Al Poreda’s death.
Leona answered as if it did. “I would have said he didn’t value himself enough,” she said sorrowfully, an abrogation.
Ĉejo’s father and his grandparents and Heza got gradually round to their old argument about Alfhilda, who was spending a night in her parents’ house. She was like Leona, a science-minded person, and she’d lately taken an apprenticeship to Anejlisa Revfiem, the plant geneticist. The whole family liked to argue mildly between them whether this was a field one could learn well without first having farmed. Ĉejo thought Leona’s and Alfhilda’s understanding of hybridizing and cloning was abstract, not rooted in the soil as his was, or Humberto’s, and he had brought this up before. But he kept out of the argument now, absorbed in the unvoiced counting of the warp ends; and when he got up from the loom, he went out to use the toilet and brush his teeth. Then he unfolded his bed in the room he shared with his father and his grandfather. He was in a mood for thinking about dying.
Against the darkness, lying on his shoulder and hip on the mat, he saw Al Poreda’s tumescent face, swollen black with blood. Once, lying waiting for sleep, he had experienced a kind of flashing intimation, had glimpsed the absolute and unending loss of himself that must be death. He had thought that he believed in the enduring of souls, but at that moment, and while the streaking white afterimage still burned behind his eyes, he had believed in nothingness. Now he lay deliberately remembering that moment of meteoric fear and astonishment, but not able to reproduce it. He turned death over and over in his mind, listening morosely to his own heartbeat and imagining carefully that men and women would be real and alive, continuing to take a great interest in food and sickness, stringing a loom, love, when he, Ĉejo, would be dead. He imagined Katrin Amundsen grieving for him, but then his mind led him away from there.
He followed Katrin to a hidden place she knew of up the ladder of her domaro into the rafters of the sadaŭ, behind baskets and a stored piece of a split bamboo wall. It was dim and dusty, a narrow triangle of space with the sloping bamboo making a sort of low roof. They sat down close together on the sadaŭ floor, facing one another. Ĉejo was anxious, filled with heat and longing, and he whispered to her, I love you, and put his mouth on her throat, his hands at her waist, at the neat fold of her hips. She arched her head back, lengthening her throat for him, rocking her hips toward him. Katrin was twenty, had a woman’s rich lust and experience. She pulled her shirt loose from the waist of her trousers and he slid his hands along the skin of her ribs, kissed her throat and her hair, her ears, her eyelids. I love you, he whispered, and helped her take her shirt off, then his. She was thin, her breasts small neat cones, the nipples very dark and peaked. He cupped them tenderly in his hands. She took a shuddering breath, arching her back, pushing her breasts into his palms. They stroked each other, her fingertips tracing his ribs and nipples, twisting the few wiry hairs in the hollows under his arms; his thumbs scribed her breasts as his hands closed slowly, fondling her. She lay back with a low sound. He kissed her throat and shoulders, the soft inner flesh of her arms, held one of her nipples lightly in his mouth, the areole springing under his tongue. She cradled his head, and her hips stirred against him. They took down each other’s trousers, and when she touched him, held him gently, a yearning fire ran under his skin. He said Katrin, whispering and urgent. She pulled his head down against the delicate skin of her belly, and he moved his mouth over her, into the heat and darkness of her opening legs. Her whole body moved to him, shuddering, a kind of wildness in the pent sound of her moaning, ah, ah, and later when she sat on him, clasping his hips between her thighs, when she put him inside her and rocked, he deliberately tried to make that same sound, ah, ah, ah, wildly whispering, moaning, as he pushed up to her in a sweetly aching undulation, but his body fille
d with the roar of his own blood and he sank into the red booming and wasn’t able to remember afterward if he had made any sound at all.
A door slid quietly and his father said something, a few words, and his grandmother answered, or Heza, soft words, shapeless, who knew what they said? After quite a while he heard the rain beginning to fall on the roof and the trees, the earth, a sound as alive as the streaming of blood.
3
Bjoro
I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses,
Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,
With at times a half-dimm’d, sadden’d far-off star,
Appearing and disappearing.
(Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth;
On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)
BJORO REALIZED HE had made a sound, dreaming. When he opened his eyes, Peder’s long eyes were open, watching him through the faceplate of the exo. He looked away from Peder’s stare, sat up shaking, and the little dream washed out of him in a flood: the long black breathless dive, he was nauseous, astonished, afraid, he said, “What!” or “Wait!” and struck the bottom of the blind slide in a burst of noise and percussion. In the dream, as in life, he had known he would die. He had thought, This is how people feel when they are dying, this surprise. But none of them were dead. If they had struck the lava field or the mountain, maybe it would have killed them; anyway Luza said it might have, she was the medic among them, and she knew dynos and forces, she’d studied physics as well. But they’d come down in water, the big lake at the edge of the old lava flows, clear of the mountain, clear of the stony field, and had saved the blown hatch door and a broken cupboard of tools, and Peder, who was broken too, and so none of them were dead yet. And they had still the finder-seekers: Bjoro’s made a pip every little while, he felt it moving his blood like an ersatz heart.
They had leaned the hatch cover against piled-up rocks to make a roof between them and the sky, and a wind blew, rattling gravel or pellets of ice against the metal. Bjoro sat under the eave of the hatch with the heels of his gloves against his eyes, and only slowly let his hands down and looked out across the lake. The prevailing color of this world was gray, the patchy snow and the gravel soaking up the colors of the sky, the lake fuliginous with silt. While he had briefly slept, there had come a thin streak of violet and cobalt blue across sixty or seventy degrees of the western horizon, obliquely defining the serrate peak of the mountain. It seemed a bruise on the sky, a sign of something dire.
Luza said, without looking toward him, “We’ll have night, eh?” and then she did glance toward him, she may have looked to see if he feared the darkness.
This world had a long slow turning, thirty hours forty-seven minutes in a revolution; they were not yet at the spring equinox. At this season of the year, there’d be seventeen hours of night. Bjoro wasn’t afraid of night, he knew what a vast blackness looked like. It was the sky that daunted him, its great tenebrous clouds sweeping toward them ceaselessly from behind the peak. The air was incredibly cold, bristly, it smelled of sulphur; he could feel its cold and its enormity in his chest, his mouth, when he took in a breath.
“Where is Isuma?” he asked Luza. He didn’t mean where but something else. He could see Isuma walking away from them following the icy margins of the lake, keeping to the rocks that bound the shore. She looked small and distant; her white exo against the grayish landscape made him think of Juko on the sail and filled him with sudden, helpless grief.
Luza kept looking out at the long lurid edge of the overcast, the night falling. “Walking down the lakeshore. Seeing is there a flat place to lay an aerostat down.”
Before they’d ever left the Miller they’d constructed a hundred elaborate emergencies and worked out a hundred elaborate responses: If the Lark was lost on landing, they would get a balloon to ride them up one at a time in its gondola. The Ruby hadn’t any other heavy-lift craft but the Lark. There were three on the Dusty Miller but they might as well be useless; it would take forty days to get one here on board the Ruby’s twin, the Dream. They had conceived the balloon rescue seriously, the six of them lounging on the floor in Isuma’s house, pushing beads around on an abacus and interrupting each other with gestures and details. If they dumped the survey equipment, there’d be room for sixty kilos; none of them weighed more than that in the .8 gravity. They’d wear exos. It would take a while is all, rising a meter a second. Would be best if they had a good landing space, flat and unimperiled, for the montgolfiere, the open balloon below the closed one, to settle its voluminous sheets out in vast array when the cold nights sank it down to them. There was a spinnaker the Ruby could deploy for steering the unmanned balloon to their finder-seekers, and when the mild day-heat lifted the thing off the ground Arda and Hans would steer by remote again, bring the Ruby’s low orbit to intersect with the apogee of the balloon.
It had been a crazy construct. They had been playing, pretending, none of them had believed it, and here was Isuma walking over the snow after a place to land the damned balloon. Bjoro laughed. But Luza’s startled look brought his fear out, and instinctively he stood up to walk away from it. Then he found he was climbing the back of the lava field to look for a landing place himself.
The ridge of stones was vast, a couple of hundred meters high, bounding the northern lakeshore in both directions out of eye’s reach, a great bulk of gravel and basalt boulders, obsidian sand. Likely the stones had spilled down molten from the shoulder of the mountain and dammed the lake; from where they were, there was no telling how wide the field was spread, no way to guess the direction of the old flow. He went up slowly on it, laboring.
His legs quickly ached; he had to stand every little while and pull the cold air in his chest. It was opposite to his whole experience: On the Miller there was diminished effort with altitude, the hub was “up,” free of gravity, effortless. He felt a wave of homesickness, standing alone and broken-winded with the storm-driven clouds and the immense mountain at his back. He had spent much of his life making ready for this venture, for this crash, even; he hadn’t expected to be rotten at it, to find his mind occupied childishly with a desperate ache for his wife and his home. He had thought, in the filmcards he had studied of unbounded landscapes, of storms and snows and seas, there remained no surprises. It hadn’t occurred to him, the vast depth of the third dimension. He hadn’t thought he would fear the sky.
Ronaldo Inomoto had made boots for them all from studying old clothes and old landscapes. Bjoro had to think about his walking, had to set these heavy boots with care among the rocks; they made him feel he was stumping on numb feet, clumsy, no sense of the ground through the thick soles. They had near drowned him. He’d splashed his arms and gotten to the floating tool cupboard with his weighted feet hanging below him, worse than useless, dragging down the buoyant exo, and Luza had got out of her boots, let them go down in the water, but she was sorry for it now, hobbling in the thin-soled feet of the exo. The ground on this world was stony and gnarled, even the snow sharp, crusted—Ronaldo had guessed some things right.
Bjoro stood, finally, hunched and wheezing at the top of the ridge of rocks, and found the view north was an immense sweep of world, beyond imagining, many hundreds or thousands of hectares of broken ground, lava fields blackish and denticulated, dirty snow in the clefts of the teeth. There was no dust in the air; the edges of things were sharp, utterly clear. He could see to the northeast a green thread raveling through the canyons of lava, maybe it was a river, and almost at the sky’s edge a line demarking two shades of gray—he had a sudden remembrance of the topo map of this continent and knew that line for the edge of the sea. Staring toward it, he felt a sort of vertigo, a dream image: He was standing on the slope high up under the ceiling of the torus but the trough of land below him slipped downward forever without a turning up. The land was immense, alive as an animal, unutterably powerful. The big mammals had been gone, all of them, de
cades before the Dusty Miller was built, Bjoro had seen them only on filmcards; but he thought this must be what people had felt once, staring in the face of the bear, the cat, the wolf—this terrible humbling before the thing so beautiful, and breathing death. He stood stricken, his breath gusting in white clouds.
He was a long time going over the rocks down to the lakeshore, stumbling slowly in the failing light. There’d been a handlamp in the tool cupboard; he saw Luza under the roof-hatch holding the lamp so the cone of light fell over Peder. On the cold wind he heard her voice, wispy, without words, and then Peder. “Enough,” he said, or “Rough.” When Bjoro crouched on the groundsheet beside them, Luza was holding Peder’s hand, saying the end of something, “. . . ought to sleep; are you keeping warm?” and Bjoro was struck with a brief, pathetic wish to be the injured one, to lie dependently under the sheltering roof and be tenderly comforted and guarded.
There were flocks of little dark birds or bats working the surface of the lake now, grazing the water and wheeling upward and then dropping to it again in close throngs. Isuma, who had come back ahead of him, was crouched under the metal roof on her haunches, looking out at the big flat sheet of the lake, and the flyers. “What is behind us?” she said in a loud voice, a voice ringing unnecessarily across the water. None of them had spoken of anything but concrete matters—what they had saved of tools, what time it was, was it Peder’s rib that had put a hole in his lung. But this bluffness in Isuma’s voice was something new; maybe she’d become angry at their situation, or blamed one of them for it, or anyway Bjoro imagined that was it and not shakiness she was hiding. She was fearless, Isuma was, and solid. He thought if he heard her voice break, it would break him.