by Molly Gloss
“There’s more work than they can keep up, maybe,” he said, but Karlos was speaking at the same time, asking if there maybe had been a trouble with the radio. When Edvard complained again about mechanical failings, it became clear they had all heard Karlos’s words over Humberto’s. In discomfort, he waited for an opening to repeat himself, but they went on talking, and in a little while the talk got away from that matter, and there wasn’t any reason for him to keep on waiting to say it.
He left the waterspout silently and sat in the deep water in the soaking tub, on the wooden bench beside Umeno Flagstad. The child was Edvard Penago’s son, a boy about three or four whose name Humberto didn’t remember. In a moment, Edvard and Karlos came into the tub. Edvard blew bubbles on his son’s wet belly before he sat on the bench. When he was bent over the boy, his clean pink anus displayed itself for Humberto and Umeno.
After everyone was settled, Humberto closed his eyes. People were finally done talking, and for a few minutes he heard only the water lapping against the underneath of his chin. The bath was hot, it smelled of mint and the camphor wood of the tub. Shortly, behind his eyes, he began to construct wild, empty landscapes of rock and sky, his mind’s work, dreamscapes that could not have been put into words. The person he placed in the world of the dream wasn’t Bjoro or Luza but himself, poking holes in the pebbly dirt with the end of a pointed stick.
The little boy said loudly, as a sort of declaration all at once, “I have a penis.” Men knew, three or four years old was an age for making these announcements, and they laughed or smiled. Humberto felt a brief pang of nostalgia. He was glad, usually, to be past his own child-rearing days; his friendship with his grown son felt easy as loose clothes. But sometimes, as now, he felt something like a loss. Where was that little boy, eh? vanished into the person Ĉejo had become.
“Bridge Troll has a penis that floats,” Umeno Flagstad said to the boy quietly, and that got the adults to smile again.
The boy looked down at his own penis in the water. After a while he said to Umeno, “Mine floats.”
Umeno studied himself in mild surprise. “I see mine does too.” There was a silence, then he said, “Bridge Troll has a penis as long as his arm. It must be the size of his penis that got Bridge Troll into trouble, eh?” Some laughter went around among them.
The boy examined his penis again, and his long thin arms bobbing in the water. “What trouble?”
Humberto had told this same tale more than once to Ĉejo, and now he thought with sudden happiness, I’ll go on telling this to my grandchildren. Umeno said, “Oh, it had to do with Koi, and the Plum Rains. Do you know that story? That time in the Plum Rains, it was hot and clammy and Bridge Troll lay down in the Ring River to cool himself. He was under the Tailed Frog Bridge where the water is very shallow, but he didn’t remember: In the mornings of the rainy season people always open a gate on the Mandala dam. The little flood came along while Bridge Troll was lying there sleeping, and his big penis floated up and carried him along the water like a boat.”
The boy’s eyes were fixed wide on him through the wet scrim of his bangs.
“Old Bridge Troll,” Umeno said, “thinking he might have to swim around the river forever, called out for somebody to rescue him. Koi swam up to see who was crying, and when he heard what Bridge Troll was worried about he laughed and said, well, he had lived all of his life swimming around the Ring River and it was a fine life. Bridge Troll, you know, has a short temper, and he had lived all of his life under bridges and wanted to go on doing it—he said he wasn’t interested in living the foolish life of a fish. Well, this made Koi spiteful and sly and he said, if Bridge Troll wanted to stop floating around the Ring River he’d have to cut off his penis.”
One of the other men, Karlos, made a scissoring gesture with his fingers in the steam rising from the water. “Ouch,” he said, and there was laughing again. The boy fidgeted, looking at their faces, waiting for the end to be told.
“Bridge Troll by now had floated half around the Ring River,” Umeno said. “And was just then under the Wake Robin Bridge. That bridge has a booming echo living under it, from the pump and the falls over there at the edge of Pacema.”
“The Falls From Grace,” Edvard said to his son, and the boy knew that place. He nodded solemnly.
“Fum-Grace, where Mario lives.”
Edvard nodded too.
“Well, there’s the pump brings water up to the head of the falls, and the water falling, the sound they make under the bridge is pretty big, eh? And when Bridge Troll heard it he got more afraid, and he told Koi to cut his penis off quick and save him from going up in the pump and down over the falls. So Koi cut off the Bridge Troll’s penis with his teeth and carried it away for his children to eat—and Bridge Troll sank to the bottom of the Ring River.”
Umeno waited for the boy’s mouth to open in understanding surprise. Then he said, beginning to make a crawling motion through the water with his hand, “Bridge Troll had to crawl along the bottom like a crayfish going round and round the Ring River forever. Or anyway until drier weather, when the river got low enough for him to crawl out under the Tailed Frog Bridge.” He began to grin slowly. “But later on old Bridge Troll stole one of Koi’s children and stitched the little fish on to his body in place of his penis. So maybe Koi was sorry for that joke he played. Do you think?”
Edvard Penagos made a sound of fright and nipped his little son’s penis under the water, between two fingers. The boy squealed and laughed, and began a game of holding his breath and crawling on the bottom of the wooden tub like a crayfish, pinching toes and penises.
When the boy and his father and Umeno Flagstad had gone home, Humberto went on sitting in the bath with Karlos. “Here’s something new I’ve got to wonder about,” Karlos said to him. He grinned. “Is there a bridge troll on that New World, eh, if there’s no bridges?”
“Trolls are canny,” Humberto said, smiling himself. “They might think of living under rocks.”
“Oh hell, there’s plenty of those, that much is true. What do you farm people think about it?”
“What? The rocks, you mean?”
“All of it. The ground, the weather. That world’s got a short year, eh? How can a crop be raised in a month?”
People who weren’t farming often didn’t pay attention to the reports, or didn’t remember them. Humberto looked away. “Fifty days. We can get crops to ripen in that time, if we have the long days. At the midlatitudes, summer daylight is either side of twenty-two hours.”
Karlos raised his brows. “How would our bodies get used to that, eh? They say we’ve all got a clock in our bodies tells us when to sleep and wake and eat. I guess I wouldn’t like to stay awake twenty-two hours, maybe plants wouldn’t like it either.”
Humberto began to feel tired and blunted. These were arguments he had heard many times. He said, “It would spur a plant to grow, I guess,” but that was only what his instinct told him. There had been three or four mathematical studies without clear result, statistical remodelings to do with atmospheric pressure, surface gravity, irradiation, axial tilt; the research was built upon known agricultural responses. Not many people believed in the studies, anyway. Reports about what had been grown in the summers at Reykjavik, Iceland, or Yakutsk, Russia, seemed too remote from them to be any longer truthful.
Karlos touched his groin, smiling boyishly. “Maybe those long days would grow me a penis long as my arm, eh?”
Humberto answered without joy. “Well I guess we could get used to it, then.”
When other men came into the bathhouse, Humberto dried himself and put on his clean clothes and went out, before the talk could get back around to the Lark. He carried his dirty clothes down to the laundry, and while he waited for the washing machine to finish its job he took a piece of needlework from his pocket, a square of linen he was hemming in a fine stitch. He sat on the flagstones at the edge of the path in front of the laundry, with his legs folded under him and the needlework
on his knee. He had meant to give the finished piece to his cousin’s daughter on the occasion of her marriage, but then had imagined it might be needed as a funeral gift for Juko on the death of her husband. Which, now?
The sewing was not an occupation for his thoughts, and because the path in front of the laundry house was not much on the way to somewhere else, he was frequently left alone to turn things over unsystematically in his mind. It was impossible to keep from thinking about the Lark, and gradually he began to worry along a new line. All the spacegoing boats were old, original equipment; the Lark’s failure maybe was age, or maintenance. He didn’t know if it was possible for the people on the Mechanics Committee to warrant a reliable go-down boat.
Parts of houses were old as the torus, and many trees, wooden chests, tables, many of them were Earth-built. The clothes washers were old stock, a clever Japanese invention; they made an ultrasonic noise that shook the dirt off into very little water. In the kitchenhouse of the domaro Humberto lived in, the stove was Earth-built, it had a short phrase in Norwegian, raised in relief on the ceramic base. Ĉejo, who was fascinated by it, had worked out the meaning. Root and Leaf, it said, and Ĉejo, every little while, would offer some new sense he had made of that old, quizzical message. But original machinery had gradually become rare. The mechanisms that survived tended to be of two kinds: simple things with few moving parts, like the clothes washers; and things too problematic for their small manufactory to re-create—spacegoing boats, sewing-machine motors, the heavy equipment of manufacture itself. Humberto imagined an absurdity: After so long a course getting to this world, they might only lack the fundamental machinery to deliver themselves and their belongings down to it.
When he carried his clean laundry home his mother was there, delivering to Heza all the guesses and certainties and dreads she had gotten from the crowd of people at Luza Kordoba’s house, all the people who were helping the family to wait, or bringing news about the rescue. Earlier, he had thought he might not want to go to the Farms Committee Meeting, in case the talk was all of the crashed boat. But now he went out to it—it would have been pointless to stay away, since even the people in his own house were keeping up their talk about the Lark and there was no escaping it.
The Alaŭdo Farms Committee for many years had made a habit of meeting in the field above the aeroponics shed, the one named The Whisper Behind the Tree. There were five carob trees standing in a rough circle in a field of cottongrass, and the committee fitted their own circle of people inside the circle of trees, people balancing tablets on their knees if they had to write something down, and bringing mats to kneel on at certain times of the year when the grass was stubbly or littered with St. John’s fruit. There were twenty people who farmed in Alaŭdo, but not often twenty at a Farms Committee Meeting—today only nine. With the fate of the go-down boat at the front of people’s minds, maybe quite a few were following the maxim that a person ought to stay away from a Meeting if not able to bring an earnest sense of listening and sharing.
Humberto seated himself between old Nores Panko and Ĝeronimo Zea in the circle, and let his eyes close for the beginning of silence.
“Ĉejo says, tell you he has gone to his mother’s house,” Ĝeronimo said, touching Humberto’s sleeve, whispering hoarsely. “Waiting for word of the Lark, eh?”
Humberto nodded. “The balloon,” he murmured, before Ĝeronimo could say it.
The committee clerk was a woman named Elisabeta Bojs, a good clerk with a facility for finding the open way. She liked to let the silence at the beginning and end of a Business Meeting go on a little longer than other clerks were inclined to, and in the long quiet Humberto felt a slow centering down, a sloughing off of his fretfulness about the crew of the Lark, until finally he was able to fill his mind with an expectant, living silence.
“Do people have concerns?” Elisabeta said at last.
After all, nobody brought up the boat. There were things to do with weeding, with getting the pejiba palm fruits down from the taller trees, and planting late mustard. People reported about the repair of the mezlando aqueduct, and raised pessimistic questions from the data sent by the Ruby. A query had been sent down from Quarterly Meeting about the possibility of burying heating cables underground to warm the soil for farming, and about the drilling of wells—whether people had considered the eventual problem of depleting the fossil water. Humberto reported on his own work with Killian Berd and Anejlisa Revfiem, and his second-hand information about the genetic tinkering Anejlisa was doing with the setsuka willows. Intermittently, Elisabeta stated her sense of the meeting, and if there was no disagreement with it, Gil Roko, who was the recording clerk, wrote it down as a Minute of the Meeting.
When there were nine recorded Minutes, and new issues weren’t being raised anymore, she brought up the problem of the leaf-cutter ants, who had built two enormous labyrinths in the midst of a hedge of cinnamomum. This problem had been brought up before, without anything being decided. The ants were in a cycle of abundance this year—new colonies had been springing up suddenly in fields and in the woodland everywhere—and Aleda Laitowler thought, when the ants had exhausted the foliage of the hedge they would begin to attack the citrus trees. He thought people ought to act before this happened, to take the role that the extinct army ants once had taken, invading the leaf-cutter ants’ subterranean galleries and chambers in the cinnamomum. Some people agreed with Aleda, but other people thought, in a few months or years the leaf-cutters would become suddenly rare again without farmers disturbing them. The population of insects was unpredictable, prone to puzzling fluctuations, this was something everybody knew.
Elisabeta had steered the arguments gently and let silence inform the spaces, but people had only put forward information to support one belief or the other, and no advance had been made. When they had last met, she had asked three particular people to study this issue, to gather information and reformulate it, set it forth in a clearer light. Out of the three, only old Nores Panko was there to make a report. He stood up slowly when Elisabeta at last raised the subject of the leaf-cutter ants. Nores never had been what people called a “weighty Friend”—someone whose voice was always worth listening to—but his old age had given him a kind of stature. He was seventy-nine years old, probably had seen other invasions of leaf-cutter ants, must have been living when the army ants inexplicably disappeared.
These leaf-cutter ants were a kind of farmer ant, he said, cutting pieces of leaves into tiny fragments like sawdust and heaping them up to make a compost in their underground chambers, which they fertilized with their own feces, and on which they sowed a fungus that produced nodules like tiny, fuzzy kohlrabi, that the ants then ate, just as human beings inoculated compost with the spore of mushrooms, and ate the mushrooms. A female ant going off to establish a new colony carried in a pocket of her cheek pieces of fungus for sowing in the new place, just as human beings transported and preserved seeds, bulbs, cuttings, for propagating their own crops.
There was a silence while Nores kept on standing. He was white-haired, but his bushy eyebrows still were dark; they made a fierce line across his face. He had a wide tender mouth that belied his brows, and a kind demeanor. He stood without a cane, leaning a bit forward with his hands folded together behind his back. Humberto sitting below him could see the slight tremor in his hands—maybe that was why he clasped them. And looking at old Nores’s hands, he began to imagine himself a member of a guild to which the peaceful fungus-growing ants also belonged—both of them vegetarian agriculturists. In the midst of the quiet, he thought of saying this, but he kept silent, waiting for someone else to bring it up. Too often he found he wasn’t able to give his values, his judgment, any coherent expression. He had formed a gingerly habit of not speaking when there was serious disagreement.
Another clerk might have counseled a longer silence, for people to consider the problem before probably tabling it again. But Elisabeta Bojs said to Nores gently, “I feel maybe you have something more yo
u want to say, Nores,” and he took a slightly different grip of his hands and sighed.
“Well I guess I do,” he said finally. “Here is something else I will tell you. I was a boy when I saw this, and I’d forgot it until I took up this reading about ants.” And he told about once seeing a colony of leaf-cutters invaded by raiding army ants. He hadn’t seen the battles, he said, only afterward the many hundreds of corpses of leaf-cutters’ soldiers strewn dead around the entrances to their galleries, and scattered for yards along the paths to and from the city. Some of the dead and dying soldiers had lost limbs or were cut in two, but there were scores without an evident injury—perhaps they’d been stung to death, he said, or they might have simply fallen dead of exhaustion; who knew how long they had kept up this defense against invaders? The army was passing in a steady stream along the paths to and from the leaf-cutters’ chambers, in and out of its portals, carrying off to their bivouac the white bodies of larvae and pupae.
Though they had killed the leaf-cutter soldiers, Nores said, they only stripped the poor nursemaid ants of their charges and left them wandering about sorrowfully, uninjured. Who knew why? After a moment, Nores added, “I guess it wasn’t anything like clemency made them do it. I suppose, in the natural way, they were leaving survivors so the ants’ city would recover, and be there when they came round to pillage it again.”
He loosed his long-boned old hands. “That’s all I wanted to say,” he said, making a shaky gesture. He sat down slowly beside Humberto, pulling his knees up slightly and resting his thin forearms across them.