The Dazzle of Day

by Molly Gloss

  The daylight was thickening when Luza, standing out by the lake, shouted and lifted her arm in a broad gesture and Bjoro stood and saw Isuma coming at a fast walk, with the loops of the samples sack hung from her shoulders.

  “Hey!” Isuma called to them from a long way off, and lifted both her hands above her head.

  They sat under the hatch and ate tubes of corn paste and papaya and drank water Luza had distilled from melted ice and hand-pumped through the little medical filter. Isuma talked while she ate, describing the route to the western end of the lake—rocks, and rocks—and then the climb up over the saddle of a ridge and below the short scree the land unclenching finally in a lovely big plain, hummocky under a nap of grass. “It’s a good field, but it’ll take some getting to. Wouldn’t choose it if you got a better place, eh?” She peered at Bjoro.

  He let out a short, stinging laugh. “Nothing,” he said bitterly. “I’ve found nothing.” He kept his head down, telling what he’d seen going east—rocks, and rocks. He told about the mud pots and the river and the basalt cliffs, the water falling over them. It wasn’t necessary to say he’d seen no place as good as Isuma’s plain.

  Isuma had made a map and she spread it out on her knees and showed them, tracing the tip of her finger along the way they would need to go, here the hard part, the saddle, it was rocky and a steep climb; getting Peder up it and down the other side was a worry, she said. She looked at Luza, and at Bjoro, and finally at Peder. Peder’s face inside the clear bubble was a frown; he may have been sleeping, or his eyes were squeezed shut against pain.

  They fell silent, in the manner of a Meeting when there was a difficult thing needing deciding. Bjoro sat with his gloved hands clasped in his lap and his eyes fixed blindly on his boots. He waited for the silence to enter his mind, so that he could focus upon this question of moving Peder the long distance to Isuma’s field. But his thoughts were helplessly chaotic; since the crash of the Lark he had felt himself drowned in futile detritus and vague horror.

  The wind rose suddenly in a little gust that blew sand against their backs and clattering against the metal of the hatch. “If it’s a good flat field?” Bjoro said, low-voiced, hunching his shoulders stiffly. “There’s no good place nearer, eh?” He was embarrassed to hear in his words a kind of impatient quality. He looked at the women and then out to the lake shore with sudden nameless anger.

  No one spoke. Bjoro imagined himself on Isuma’s flat field, watching the balloon’s slow descent. He couldn’t keep from thinking of himself rescued, embracing Arda and Hans in the close familiarity of the Ruby, weeping, speaking over the radio to Juko, waiting the crackly moments for her voice to reach him in return.

  “It’s a good field,” Isuma said. “Just a long damn way.” She looked from one of them to the other, grimacing painfully.

  Luza was holding Peder’s hand, rubbing her gloved thumb measuredly across his gloved palm. She sat hunched with her eyes on her other hand where it was clasped inside the bend of her knee. “We would need to make a kind of litter for carrying Peder,” she said finally, murmuring. “Maybe Bjoro can get the hatch door to come apart, we could use a panel from it?”

  An exquisite relief sprang from Bjoro’s chest and out to the ends of his fingers and his feet in a quick, cleansing wash. He stood and got his tools out of the cupboard.

  The sky had filled with grays, blacks; the mountain’s peak and the edge of the horizon were lost behind the lowering overcast. Isuma held the handlamp for him while he backed out screws and turned nuts from bolts and cut metal with a little torch. He was comforted by the work. When he had the sheet of metal free of the hatch, he kept on in the utter blackness, with Luza or Isuma turnabout holding the light while he bent up a rim, strengthened the underneath, rolled a smooth edge on the handholds. He quit finally when the others asked for sleep, but afterward, lying with Isuma in the cold blackness, he imagined new improvements, and invented ways to get them done with the tools he had at hand. I thought of lessening the weight by cutting out holes in the metal, he would tell Juko when he was with her again.

  The weather worsened overnight and in the morning a needly snow fell on the wind. There was no seeing the mountain now, but no comfort in the closing in of horizons, as the great black clouds came down to the southern margin of the lake. They got Peder into the litter and carried him west without waiting for Bjoro’s remodeling of the metal. The wind was frigid, blown at them across the sweep of the lake so they were driven to walk with their shoulders twisted sideward, heads bent, crablike. Two carried the forepart, one the rear, changing about their places every little while. Bjoro thought the weight seemed light in the first minutes but then swiftly it was heavier. Isuma had guessed the distance to the landing field at eleven or twelve kilometers, and he had imagined himself walking the circle around the torus ten times. All right. Not so far. But it wasn’t the torus they were circling, and Peder’s weight was leaden, cumbrous. They had to stop often and let him down and stand over him, all three of them, gasping, with their backs hunched to the wind and the stinging, bitter snow.

  Gradually Bjoro’s hands began to bleed through the gloves where the edges of the handholds sawed against his palms. His back, his shoulders, his legs ached. He became grateful for Luza’s blistered feet slipping in Peder’s big boots, a reason for more and more frequent standstills. It occurred to him, none of them had ever carried a heavy thing more than a short way. Heavy work was in the hub, where tools and metal pieces and equipment weighed little or not at all.

  He took to sorting back through his life methodically, seeking the times he had carried weight, but it was all trivial, occasional: He had used to carry his son, Eneo, his daughter, Abigajlo, years ago, home from someone else’s house when they’d fallen asleep there; he’d pushed wheelbarrows piled up with dirt or oranges when the farming people were at their busy times; he had carried a box of tools or a piece of equipment from one ŝiro round to another. He was unprepared, inapt, they all were, for this terrible labor. A sudden new despair gripped him: Had anyone thought, before now, how they would get their hard work done on this world, without a freefall place for doing it?

  Whenever they stood hunkered around the litter, Peder’s eyes watched them through the clear faceplate, a childish look, confused, afraid. Once, his mouth moved, he was telling them something. Luza got the skull off and put her ear close to hear his whispery voice: “Where are we going?” His mouth made a strange twist, a sort of smile.

  Luza’s face was stricken with guilt. She couldn’t find an answer. She looked at Bjoro, and at Isuma. A sudden heat rose in Bjoro’s neck and his ears. He crouched stiffly. “Isuma’s found us a landing place for the balloon,” he said. He twisted his own mouth in a burning grimace. “You’ll get the first ride up, eh?” Peder breathed a sound, shut his eyes slowly. Someone else made a sound too: Bjoro heard the low whining clamped behind teeth. It was Isuma, or Luza, or the sound was in his own throat.

  When they went on slowly across the stony ground with the wind driving the hard snow against them, Bjoro found the distance between his body and his thoughts began swiftly to widen. He was aware of the voices of the others, and of stopping and going on, lifting and setting down, he knew he was chilled, that his hair was a wet mantle clinging cold along his scalp. He continued to turn things over in his mind—regrets and forebodings, imagined quarrels, reimagined events—but his body’s discomfort separated itself from him, became dreamlike, translucent. He imagined he was outside, floating directionless upon a gray space, in the silence and warmth and shelter of an intact exo.

  He remembered that he had had a surgical repair when he was seven or eight, a benign cyst, and coming up from the anesthetic afterward had felt as he did now: unable to focus on any visual image, detached from his pain. If I spoke, I would be clear of it, he thought, but could not get his mouth to move, words to come out. This is how people feel when they are dead, he thought. This bodiless stillness.

  He heard a shout, it was Isuma
, but there was a long slow suspension before he knew what she had said. “Here! The saddle!” And he shouted too, it was his own voice he heard, an incoherent yell of joy, as he broke the surface in a dazzle like sunlight.

  They set Peter down on the ground below the ridge and Luza stayed there with him while Bjoro climbed with Isuma to the top. It was a hard steep going, they had to find handholds, footholds, on the icy stones, the frozen mud. Bjoro kept from thinking of how they would get Peder up this way. But from the swale of the saddle, the plain lay white and smooth under new snow, a great startlingly open reach, a landing field.

  They had brought all of the finder-seekers, Peder’s and Luza’s and their own. They climbed and slid down the gravelly scree onto the plain and paced out a big diamond, stuck the little robot devices down in the snow at the four corners. Bjoro stood a hundred meters across from Isuma at the last corner, the snow falling between them, and lifted his arm, then both his arms, grinning madly. He was filled with a keen hope now. Isuma’s shout came to him on the wind, a flutter like paper, he didn’t hear it all: “. . . saved!” she said.

  The scree was fine gravel, they had slid down it abruptly on their haunches; now the climb up was a ceaseless, inefficient struggle against the little sliding stones. The east side, the big icebound boulders, seemed to Bjoro to become abruptly less formidable, and getting Peder up that way began to seem possible. He went over in his mind a plan for rigging the litter—hanging it from a sort of harness at the shoulders so their hands could be free; two of them to carry Peder, one to steady the others, give a hand up, scout the best way. The balloon would be a while yet getting to them, there was time, they would go slowly.

  Luza stood below, watching them climb down from the saddle. Her yell came up to them in pieces: “. . . okay?” they heard, and “. . . set?” Isuma straightened and cupped her hands at her mouth, shouted back, “We’ve done it!” Bjoro thought when he saw Juko he would tell her the way Isuma’s voice had sounded then, fierce and joyous.

  There were cords in the waists of the exos, tethers for the sail work, and Bjoro made use of them for his rigging, though it was little enough like his imagining. He made the straps short on a first try, to bring the litter high enough to clear the rocks; but it was too high to lift from the hips. When one of them let go to seek a handhold in the rocks, or put a hand out for balance, the sway was wild, Peder’s face in the exoskull a white mask, terror. So he had to fiddle with the length of the cord until the weight hung lower, hip-height, and he rigged a waist yoke to check the sway. Better. Isuma and Bjoro carried, Luza scouted the path up, and came back to help them clear the rocks, lift the weight over the worst places.

  Bjoro’s hands went on bleeding, and his knees now, his elbows, from crawling over the rocks, from stumbling to catch the litter when Isuma fell, from falling himself. The cords of the rigging dug into his shoulders, whipsawed his hips. He sweated within the exo, and the suit gradually lost ground, could not keep up with the diaphoresis. While he worked, he wasn’t cold, only wet, but when they sat to catch their wind, the sweat chilled him swiftly and he would shake, was a long time building back the heat when they stood again to drag Peder on up the ridge.

  Luza led them an erratic way up, switchbacking across the steep face following the flattest stones or the brief open ways across little deltas of gravel drifted with the new snow. Sometimes she led them to an impasse; they had to go back and find a new way, or muscle the litter up over the boulder that stood in the path. They didn’t speak, any of them, except as they had to: There was little enough breath for climbing, and it broke from them in loud, white explosions. They hoisted Peder’s terrible weight above their shoulders, shoved it through old crusted drifts, dragged it up through the great stones.

  Bjoro began gradually to take a kind of offense at Peder’s terrorized look and the rigid clench of his hands on the edge of the hatchcover. He found he couldn’t keep from watching the sky for the descent of the balloon, irrationally fearful it might land and rise again without them if Peder’s unwieldy burden kept them from getting over the ridge in good time.

  Unexpectedly, Luza came back to them, shouting, her boots sliding little rocks down the hill. “We’ve got there! You’re at the top, the catbird seat! Bjoro! Isuma!”

  They went up the bitter end of it, shouting weakly, foolishly, and letting Peder’s weight down at last on the other side of the saddle, along the south-sloping talus. The wind blowing fierce over the top drove the snow like sand, but they sprawled there in the lee of the ridge, spent and joyous, looking out on the plain, the landing field. They would lower the litter down the gravelly scree on a cord, it would be quick and easily done. They had got over the damned thing.

  Luza said, “Oh,” suddenly, in an odd voice, and Bjoro looked, blinking, wiping the snow-crusted sleeve of his exo against his eyes. There was a spray of blood on the faceplate of the exo; Peder was hidden behind it.

  He watched stupidly while Luza pulled around the pack she had carried, dumped their tools and supplies, pawed through until she had the med kit. She slid the hardhat from Peder’s head and, kneeling there on the gravel in the snow, cleaned her hands with the sterile packets of wipes and then swiftly rolled Peder’s exo down, cut a hole in his neck and pushed in a little piece of plastic tubing. She cut a hole in the chest of the tough exo and in Peder’s tender skin, and threaded in another plastic tube that filled immediately with pink, frothy blood that ran out in a stain on the snow. The sound of Peder’s breath above the whistle of the wind stopped Bjoro’s heart.

  He remembered suddenly it had been Peder’s wife who had been afraid. It had been Peder’s wife, a woman Bjoro didn’t know, a woman named Juanita or Juana, who had worn that smile between set teeth, on the day the families of the Ruby had sat down together on the matted cottongrass in the Mandala orchard and held a sort of celebration, a good-bye supper, though no one was calling it that. It had been Peder’s wife whose eyes had followed her husband.

  Bjoro had watched Juko privately to see if he might catch something like that in her eyes, but she was like his mother, autonomous, solid, not given to dreams of romance, or adventure; when he looked, she was intent on something told to her by Arda Mejina’s husband, or she was laughing and pushing Hans Arnesen away from her for the bad joke he told. And obscurely, he had envied Peder Ojama his wife. Had not imagined, then, that any of them might really die. Had felt that Peder’s wife’s fear was a kind of pleasure, a prize. Now he was suddenly appalled by the childishness of his feelings, the incompleteness of his imagining.

  He had not prayed, nor believed in the efficacy of prayer, since he was seventeen, but he began to repeat and repeat in his throat soundlessly, God, please, please, please, God, and finally, rocking on his heels in the stinging wind, he gave himself over to it, began helplessly to pray Hans and Arda hadn’t gone away without them; that the balloon could be brought down accurately in the wind not once but four times; that the Ruby would find and retrieve the damned aerostat four times over when it rose again out of the sky. He prayed for life, and for home. What was prayer but the listing of hopes that were otherwise irrecoverable? God, please, please, please, God.

  They went on sitting beside Peder, crouched shaking in the blowing snow in the scant shelter of the rocks along the top of the ridge, while Luza kept the tubes clear with a little pump she worked in the palm of her hand. She said she was afraid to move him further until he’d rallied. Or died, Bjoro thought desolately. He listened to his own breath and his heartbeat, and Peder’s, and helplessly frowned out across the plain where the blown snow rose in immense gauzy curtains.

  He was too cold and too worn out to keep on feeling things deeply, and fell into a tired numbness and then into a short, unquiet sleep. When he woke, the wind had died. The stillness of the air confused him; he looked out on the plain in bleary disorientation. The light had begun to fail. The sky and the snow were sooty gray, and in the vast midsky, the silvery sheets of the descending montgolfiere soaked u
p the dull ochre color of the horizon.

  Isuma was asleep beside him, but Luza sat up with Peder’s head on her thigh. The skin of her face was chapped, her lips swollen and fissured. She made a stiff, pursed grimace and shrugged her shoulders when she saw Bjoro looking. The skin of Peder’s face was grayish, there was a line of old blood below his nose. Luza rested her hand across his brow lightly with the fingers spread as if she hid his eyes from the luminous shine of the balloon.

  4

  Kristina

  Ebb, ocean of life (the flow will return),

  Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother,

  Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me,

  Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you.

  BECAUSE HER SHRUNKEN old bladder couldn’t be made to wait so well anymore, Kristina sat herself in the doorway of the lavejo, leaning against the jamb so she could get to the toilet if the Meeting ran long. In the last year, Meetings for Business had naturally been drawn out with all these matters to do with the New World, but since the Ruby was gone ahead of them even the weekly Meetings for Worship had been lengthening—people were anxious or ebullient by turns, they wanted to speak of the eventful times.

  It was up to members of the Ministry and Counsel Committee to sense the end of a First Day Meeting and bring it to a timely close, and increasingly they had trouble apprehending the moment, erring always on the side of inaction. That was all right—Kristina liked their inefficient spiritualness. This domaro had had counselors in the past who were without sufficient silence, people who would interrupt thoughtful quietism. Luisa Jamaguĉi, who was clerk when the domaro held a Meeting for Business, and Iteja Peron, who was clerk of the Pacema Monthly Meeting, were both of them better at bringing an overlong Meeting to an end, but neither would sit at a Meeting for Worship—Kristina considered it a weakness in those two, that they never had written a Minute having to do with the Holy Spirit.