by Molly Gloss
He meant to keep his own words flat, steady, but they jumped out too quick for him, mimicking Isuma a little, edgy and loud. “This field of lava goes on north to the horizon,” he said. “Northeast a little river cutting it, and then maybe the ocean. There’s no place that way.”
“Well, no place round this lake is flat enough, big enough, and anyway all sharp stones,” Isuma said. She looked at Bjoro. “How far would you say, to the ocean?”
Bjoro shook his head. “Far. I don’t . . . My eye . . .” He shook his head again. “What’s between is bad land, old lava,” he said angrily. He realized he was grateful for Peder’s flattened lung. They would need to carry him, and that would keep them from crossing the vast black canyons to the river delta and the sea.
“South is the mountain,” Luza said in a moment, the only one of them with a mild voice. She looked at them both. “So we’re left only the east and the west, between the peak and the lava bed, either end of the lake.” She gestured vaguely.
Isuma said, growling, “We ought to find a place quick, and get our selves and our finder-seekers onto it, before they bring the damn balloon down in the middle of the lake.”
“They’ll wait, I bet,” Luza said. “They’ll wait to see if the seekers move: If the seekers don’t move, they’ll be thinking we’re killed.” She grinned slowly, baring her teeth. The plan had been to mark a diamond of landing field by the four finder-seekers. No one had said what the plan would be if the seekers never were made to mark a diamond.
Isuma grinned too, and finally Bjoro did, something to do with not being dead.
They agreed they would do turns with Peder, two would sleep while one sat up, getting a pulse and a breath count every little while and clicking on the handlamp to feed him painkillers. There was a med box that had been kept in the tool cupboard but no respirator in it, no possibilities for reinflating the lung. Luza wasn’t a surgeon anyway, and the lung had a hole in it. She said he wasn’t bleeding much into his belly, only the rib gave him pain and the empty lung made him wheeze. She said they ought to keep a lookout for ashy color, bubbles in his breath, blood from his mouth or his nose.
They fell silent, and in a while, without speaking again, Luza put out the handlamp and they faced the cold darkness. Their own weather was a Costa Rican analogue, humid subtropical, its two seasons warm-wet and warm-dry. The hub was the only cold place on the Miller, it was ten degrees there, or even less; but Bjoro’s imagination hadn’t made him ready for a true coldness of the air. It was zero in the daylight here, would drop to minus ten or fifteen overnight. The exos were proof against the cold, but a bared scalp, the back of the neck, one’s eyes, let the heat out of the torso as if the exo had been breached. There had been skullcaps made by the Fiber Arts Committee, tuques knitted tight from kapok yarns, but lost in the crash. Escaping the Lark, they’d thrown off the hardhats and afterward only recovered two, the things cumbrous in the gravity anyway. They put one on Peder because of its respiratory assist, but none of them used the other, they crouched together, shaking, with the black wind blowing to their bones. There were no stars. The wind shook the air noisily. It was, after all, not the blackness of space.
Luza and Isuma lay down together on the groundsheet behind the windbreak of the tool cupboard and Bjoro hunched himself into the close space between Peder and the women, with his arms clasping his knees to his chest, and his head sunk down between his arms. Gradually he found he couldn’t keep from tears, and it was only the touch of the others, an arm, a leg pressing against him, that saved him from crying out loud. His mind felt crowded with an ill-defined horror, wordless, inchoate. He worked his mouth silently. After a while the repetitive action comforted him. He began to think about his wife, an aching, aimless jumble of details and remembrances.
He had a habit, when Juko wasn’t with him, of recasting a gossip he’d heard, an argument, an occurrence, for later telling to her. He liked to imagine elaborately where they would be when they were next together, at supper or lying in bed, and his words, and Juko’s face listening to him, her voice making a response. The actual telling never was much like his imagining. He knew he went over these resumés and over them, to extend his enjoyment of some events, and to get a sort of control over others. In his mind he had told and retold Juko every consequential thing that had happened to him since the Ruby had gone ahead of the Miller. But he had done little of it in these hours since the Lark crashed. What he had seen from the ridge looking out toward the sea was unspeakable—I don’t . . . My eyes . . .—and Juko wasn’t where he could find her in his mind anyway. He’d lost track of real time, didn’t know if it was night there now, or day, if she was on the sail, or eating, or sitting in the bath, or saying his name in her sleep.
He realized suddenly: By now she might think I am dead. He imagined her, imagining him killed, lying on her back in their bed, looking up blindly into the ceiling. She was not prone to tears, but he imagined her weeping for him, and for a childish moment he felt contrite, as if he must apologize for living on. But then it wasn’t childish, and he was apologizing for something else, something to do with the vast gray landscape and the frigid wind blowing out of the sky.
He never slept. When he had done his third of the night sitting up, he lay on his hip behind the windbreak, his body clasped together with Luza and later with Isuma, his eyes shut and his teeth locked against the cold, waiting for daylight, which was only a thinning of blackness to gray.
The wind had subsided in the last hours of the night and now the air felt depthless, bated; Bjoro felt its slight tremble when any of them made a motion through it, or spoke a word. He had a sense that their movements would rouse the wind again, that they ought to lie still and silent, becalmed. But in the scant early light, Luza and Isuma took turns walking away along the stony shore to empty their bladders and then he had to do it too, stumbling stiffly in the big, hard boots and standing to relieve himself on the piled-up rocks. He kept his back to the flat, lead-colored field of the lake, the great bleak sky, the mountain. From where he stood watching the steam of his urine, he could hear Luza and Isuma speaking to one another, breaking loose the stillness.
They ate tubes of lemon paste and, while Bjoro fed one to Peder, Isuma and Luza went over their little bit of saved rig. Isuma piled up tools: a big, light hammer and a theodolite; a narrow rock pick; a seismograph; a sack for rock collection. She cut a corner out of the ground sheet and found in the tool cupboard a pen that would write on the plastic. She was a geologist, and knew a little about surveying, so it became clear: She meant to do some of what they’d planned, meant to get samples and take measurements and make maps, while she looked out for a place to bring down the aerostat.
Luza was gathering together Bjoro’s tools for measuring climate. His field was mechanics and after that meteorology; the machine they had was dead, drowned, but he had spent years studying weather and Luza was methodically piling up his pressure tester, anemometer, hydrometer, the old-world devices unneeded for 175 years—accoutrements of another people, another place, and utterly alien to him, he realized now. Bjoro wanted to laugh at these women’s scrupulous diligence, had to set himself against a rush of anger and despair. What were they thinking? That this was a world they might, in fact, want to live on?
“There’s only the one binoculars,” Luza said. Her brow was drawn up, worrying over this. She was a fussy person, she liked to arrange things systematically. Bjoro didn’t want to take the little instrument onto his stack, hadn’t any wish to see this world writ larger. But Isuma was quick; she pushed the old Japanese binoculars at him. “I see farsighted,” she said. She squinted her eyes, then widened them childishly.
Luza kept looking at the organization of their choices, adding to one pile and then the other some of Peder’s things—specimen kits for soil and water, packets of biological sample sheafs—and her own things—a rad counter, a flat little thermocouple. When she was satisfied, she pulled her mouth out slowly. “Don’t get lost,” she sa
id, and let her teeth show.
It was Isuma who laughed, expelling whitish clouds of her breath. It sounded like, “Ha! Ha!” and the loud, hard words reporting across the lake startled birds into the sky, not the flyers of the night before but three big water-birds, long-necked, beating their wings in hard, slow effort. Bjoro started too. He hunched his back, anticipating the wind, but the birds wheeled and gradually settled again, the air closing like a skin of water, shivering, and then seamless.
Without a word, Isuma went away along the edge of the lake toward the west, carrying her tools in the rock-collecting sack. She appeared resolute, walking short-strided, not swinging the sack. Bjoro, pushing his own tools in a duffel, looked after her with sudden desperate loneliness. Luza stood to watch her go. Then she looked at Bjoro. A tear had run down beside her nose, though her mouth was still set in a kind of smile, earnest, intent. He couldn’t smile, himself. He stood up and walked away quickly east, shaking.
He looked back every little while. The ridge and the lake lay in an oxbow, the curve hiding Isuma from him, but he could see Luza standing before the tipped-up hatch cover watching after both of them, one and then the other. The daylight had come into the sky by then and the air was shadowless, pellucid, under a flat overcast. The light in the Miller was yellowy, rich; he didn’t know why the shallow gray light here, the colorlessness, seemed blindingly bright. He was able to see Luza’s face clearly, the faint line of frown, her pursed mouth, even from a distance. Once, he raised his arm to Luza and in a moment she lifted hers in a broad sweep. He might have been a kilometer from her at that point, but the clarity of the air allowed him to see her bare open palm, the spread of her fingers. The sight of her standing small and distinct and familiar against the unfamiliar, outspread, scabrous landscape, evoked in him something like awe and tenderness.
When he had finally got beyond seeing Luza, when he was alone with the variously gray, utterly empty fields of dirty snow and of rock extending boundlessly before and behind him, the sense of his solitude flooded him with anguish. For a moment he was paralyzed, his breath letting in and out in quick, choking huffs, the clouds of his respiration remaining sharp and white and motionless in the air. At last he heard the finder-seeker, its steady slow pip inside his exo, against his skin, and he put his hand to it, spreading his fingers, pressing until he could feel its beat against his palm, irrationally reassuring.
The lake was incalculably long, stretched out along the depression at the foot of the mountain. It was slow and effortful getting across the old snow and the rocks, but the quality of the cold was changed without the wind—it had a purity that he suffered more easily than the blowing—and he found that walking between the skirts of the lava ridge and the long impoundment of the lake gave him some little sense of narrowness, of margin. He felt himself steadying, settling into a work. He became used to the sound of his own breathing in the stillness. A couple of times he climbed the rocks partway and looked out unwillingly upon the long sweep of the lake, the high, serrated chine of the mountain, and ahead along the edge of the lava field—everywhere rocks—but he didn’t use the Japanese binoculars, and he kept his eyes mostly away from the horizons.
The lake was shallow at its eastern end, a margin of water weeds and gravel, and he took a weed as a specimen. Where the shore curved away to the south he thought he would go on following it stubbornly, feeling if he kept to the lake’s edge there wasn’t any way to lose his own trail. But there was an outlet—an incredibly white chute of water falling away steeply downhill from the lake into the canyons of the lava field—and he was stopped by it, had to stand at the fall line of the swift little river and consider where to go now. After a while, a chill slid down along his spine and he started to shake, so he turned and went on doggedly, following the bank of the stream now, east into the lava.
It was difficult to keep the river in sight. Anxiously he pulled out his compass every little while and took a line on a pile of stones, a hummock of ice, the shoulder of the peak, sighting out to the horizon and noting his place in the pages of a little notebook meant to record the weather.
Finally, from a high vantage, he looked out to the east and saw the land flattening gradually and the field of lava tailing off. Where the river slowed and widened, turning north to find the sea, there were plumes of white, a cluster of them. He sat down, shaking, and got out the binoculars. The focus was wrong: He fiddled with it until the horizon jumped up in front of his eyes and drove his breath out in a burst. There were six or seven sheer white columns against the gray, rising straight until they blurred and tore along the line of their joining to the overcast. He watched through the glasses, stricken for a moment with a wordless fear. For years they’d been making the unmanned fly-arounds. It was known there were no thinking beings living on this world: It was a young place, nascent, populated with birds and invertebrates and small mammals, small reptiles. What he saw was steam, or smoke, climbing up from a volcanic cleft, a solfatara. But for that one speechless moment he imagined the straight shafts of white were spokes holding high the ceiling of the sky.
The plumes stood together and far off for quite a while without his getting any nearer. Only when he came up on the first one, he could see the rest were spread out over dozens of hectares, the last of the six maybe another two or three kilometers north and east of the first, on the slope that fell off beyond the northern end of the lava field. What they marked was a company of stinking mud pots, the ground between them thawed and sloppy, yellow, spotted with tufts of brownish grass. The air was sulphurous, spoiled; he skirted around the field with his chin sunk down in the neck of his exo.
Where the lava field finally flattened out and was finished, the river sloped off northeastward across broken shelves of rock; he went on following it to the edge of the mud field. The view dropped off to the north suddenly, and there was the river spreading out, edged with low basalt cliffs, scattered with little islands, the water shallow, gray-green, the islands brownish gray, flat, pocked with hardened snow, or ice. Away from the canyons of rocks, the volcanic sweepings, there was a small wind blowing off the water, wet and smelling of salt. He stared out at the sudden vista, appalled, his eyes filling with tears. The edge of the sky was unbearably distant. He had to turn away from it until he had his heart back.
They had not spoken of how far to go, when to come back. He had come near turning back when he had first got clear of Luza—he had stood minutes there with his hand on the finder-seeker, intending it. Maybe, after all, the aerostat would lay out gently on the rocks, wouldn’t be torn—he had thought of arguing for that. Now he thought of it again. He was afraid of the wind, and of walking away from the comfort of the lava field. It was a kind of relief that the widening ground south of the river mouth kept on stony to the horizon.
By an effort of will, he got the binoculars up and made a slow search north and east, the land sprawled vast before him now without the ridge of rocks, the lake to bound it. Through the eyes of the binoculars, he saw birds were nesting in the hummocks on the little islands. Water fell down in several narrow white lines across the face of the basalt cliffs—what did this mean? He had thought he had come to the delta of the little white river, but now he realized it might be the incision of a fjord.
As a sort of balm against guilt, he put a few blades of grass in bio sheafs, took little specimens of mud from the boiling pots, made perfunctory measures of pressure, altitude, humidity. And then he started back west along the skirts of the river toward Luza, and the shelter. He knew the few landmarks, going back, and ticked them off in his mind as he went past them—it was a reassuring exercise, it shortened the way. But the wind came on a little, blowing out of the east and down through the combes of the lava, and he feared worse weather. He pushed himself to go quicker, the long muscles in his thighs and his calves burning and shaky. He hadn’t any sense of time of day, had to keep looking at his timepiece to orient himself to the long solar period, comfort himself that he had hours yet before the
sky would blacken.
When he came in sight of the lakeshore, he kept watching for Luza until the watching became an anxious yearning. He got out the Japanese binoculars and searched up the long rock-bound margin for her, and the empty sweep of shoreline raised in him an unreasonable, sudden fear he’d been left alone, the others gone off without him. After that he carried the binoculars in his hand, stumbling swiftly among the stones and over the patchy ice and stopping every little while, frozen with terror, to look where he remembered Luza had been, standing with her open palm raised to him. It was a while before he understood, he had all along been seeing the sheltering roof there among the big stones, the long white smooth hatchcover defined by the black gasket. He stared at it through the lenses, and when Luza came out from under it and walked down to the edge of the water, swinging a plastic bottle, he began to cry.
He put away the binoculars and wiped his eyes and walked deliberately down along the lake toward the camp. When Luza saw him, she came out to meet him, grinning madly in the unreal daylight. “Thought I’d been left forever!” she called to him. He shook his head, smiling dimly.
They sat under the hatch-roof with Peder and stared out at the lake. There weren’t any birds. The wind made the water rough, its shine colorless. “It’s rocky land, all of it. There wasn’t any point going farther,” he said to Luza when she asked him. “I thought Isuma would be back.” For the most part they were silent, waiting for Isuma, listening to Peder’s tired wheeze. Every little while Luza walked out to the edge of the rocks and looked off to the west and then walked back slowly without speaking. Bjoro watched his timepiece, and the edge of the mountain where the sky had shown color the evening before.