by Molly Gloss
He slept and woke, slept and woke. Juko lay unmoving, her eyes hidden behind her arm, her breath heavy and slow. It was impossible to tell if she was awake or asleep. The third or fourth time he woke and looked at her, her arm had slipped down and she lay with her mouth slack against the mattress, her eyes jumping behind the lids. He felt a brief spurt of shame, as if what he saw was intimate and revealing, but he wasn’t able to stop watching her dreaming, the tips of her fingers spasming helplessly. A tenderness and love for his wife engulfed him suddenly, and when the dream slipped out of her, when her face became minutely tighter, less defenseless, he wasn’t able to go on watching her, or loving her. In the darkness he put on his trousers and went softly out of the room, the house.
It was preparing to rain, the night air humid and heavy. The weak light cast out of houses threw black shadows along the walls. Chickens slept along the eaves of roofs, on the tops of walls, and among the yellow trumpets of the ajamanda vines that climbed over arbors at the edges of fields. Bjoro stood on the bottom step of his house, looking without holding anything in his mind, and then started downhill following the footway between the crowded houses, under the star-shaped shadows of the trees. The murmuring restlessness of people inside the houses was an inescapable field of sound. As he stood beside the clamor of the Falls From Grace waiting for the lift, a rain began, and his breath came hard in the clammy night. The ambient light was dimly yellow; the rain falling through it looked fine and white as snow. It was an unexpected summoning of another landscape, and brought with it a sudden, vast conviction: The division between himself and Juko was as impenetrable as death, this wife as lost to him as the first. He was choked with self-pity. At Hlavka’s death he had felt a fear and knowledge that had overpowered his reason—it had been impossible not to blame her for dying, for succumbing inexplicably to an asthma she’d withstood for thirty years. Now he realized that he blamed Juko, too, in a vague but certain way, for not understanding what he had been unable to articulate.
He took the lift up to the center of the world. He had no expectations, no intentions, but he understood darkly: The metalline, strident, fluorescent chambers of the manufactory were a sacred space for him. Other people oversaw the machinery, kept up the ordinary maintenance and repair, but when there was a breakdown Bjoro was someone they asked to help them with it; he considered the glass kiln and the complicated apparatus of the paper mill and the foundry to be his province. This was a familiar landscape, manageable, ordered, and his yearning for it now seemed a kind of prayer.
In the hub, where certain machinery needed tending, there was work done around the hours: People fiddled at panels and boards, clambered over the machines, in rooms Bjoro looked into. He felt charged with loneliness, with separation, and kept away from the people he saw, kept to the Byzantine passageways in a kind of furtive agitation. No one stood by the keys in the glassworks. Without thinking of doing it, he scaled the batch hopper there, pulling up with his arms in the light air and retreating urgently into the narrow space between the ceiling and the furnace.
The air was hot, thick. When he had climbed the glass kiln, working, he always had protected himself, worn a stoker rig, but now he was barefoot, barechested, and the heat against the skin of his belly gave him an unexpected feeling of liberation, of abandon and risk. He put his hands down delicately, deliberately, against the feverish surface of the furnace and walked on his palms across the metal, his legs and feet following, drifting and buoyant. Beneath him the furnace made a continuous, hot susurration that entered his bones through the burning tips of his fingers.
At the center of the furnace where the batch was fed to the cauldron down a gullet and windpipe, he cooled his hands on the standpipe. There was a place among the conduits, an awkward cranny there, and he settled onto it, giving himself over to the effort of getting a breath into his lungs and out again in the dim heat. He felt pleasantly giddy, empty-headed. His body gave up a little of its lightness, and when his breastbone came down slowly against a gas pipe he reached through the web-work of flues and lines and siphons and scrupulously rested his palms, then his forearms, against the surface of the furnace.
He had once crouched in the narrow chamber of the kremaciejo, holding a wrench on a nut while Opal Nansen had slowly turned the bolt out from the other side. But the furnace had been shut down for days by then, and the crematory cell had been cool and dim. It was inlaid with heat-bearing tiles and there had been a minute dust of ash on the tiles. He had felt something integral and clarifying when he had run water in the sink afterward and carefully rinsed his hands, imagining the little trickle of gritty, grayish water in the catch basin delivered ultimately to the feet of cabbages, cassavas, mango trees. Inside the kremaciejo he had been able to slide down onto his back, stretch his legs out, without imagining his own death. It was now, in the heat and the narrow, dirty darkness among the pipes of the glassworks, that he had a sudden apprehension of his body consumed in fire.
He shut his eyes, with his arms laid trembling against the furnace, and looked inward, following the slight rush of air across the back of his throat, the intake and outtake of his breath. But he couldn’t keep his attention there, his closed eyes following the breath out across his teeth and then flying loose in a gasp, and his arms betraying him involuntarily, recoiling. His eyelids started open, and he lay in the narrow interstice, huffing his breath. Clumsily he turned his palms up, examining them in the dimness; the fleshy pads of his fingers, the heels of his hands began to whiten and blister as he looked. He extended his arms, peering at them through a screen of tears. The tender skin on the inside of his forearms was striped ruby red. He squeezed his eyelids closed in an exaltation of agony. He had to push himself, clambering once, twice with his elbows, his heels, to get clear of the pipes, to free himself from the cleft space between the conduits before he had the room to pull his arms up, to clasp the pain like a pillow against his chest.
They had left Peder Ojama’s body on the stony ridge, lying on one hip under a thin sheet of snow. Isuma had told them a body might lie more or less intact for months, or a year: The prevailing weather made a slow process of decay. Not many scavengers lived on this world. Bjoro had wondered if she was saying something else, something revealing—that there would be time enough for Peder’s family to come back for his body, to collect it for burning. Was she saying, then, that this bitter place was to be their world? He had wanted to argue with Isuma—he had wanted to set fire to the body there on the ridge, in the snow. But she had begun tenderly to arrange the limbs, drawing the knees to the chest, crossing the arms, fitting the hands under the armpits until Peder lay in the posture of a child protecting his center; and Bjoro’s mouth had only filled with sourness and heat.
Afterward Luza and Bjoro had stood on the ridge in the blowing wind, watching the spectacular burning of Isuma’s wrecked montgolfiere, the lifting flurries of sparks in the black night. And later, in the daylight, in the long waiting while the Ruby brought a second balloon round to try again, they had walked over the hummocky grass a kilometer or more to look for Isuma’s body among the cooling ashes. The brief hot burning had left a blackish mass on a skeleton, and standing over it, Bjoro had felt something incomprehensible, something brutal and requited.
8
Kristina
I go from bedside to bedside, I sleep close with the other sleepers each in turn,
I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.
BECAUSE NO ONE in her own household had taken sick, people were quick to ask of Kristina her time, her hands, in families where several people were down. She took on the fetching and the laundry for her neighbor Lavka Valen’s household, and then the household of Jakobo Saldado—Jakobo was her dead sister’s son—but when she was coming or going from those houses other people would catch her up, to ask if she would do a particular thing: carry the baby a minute; stir the pot; go and see if so-and-so needed a drink or had tak
en sick overnight. She found the urgent work of getting round to committees had to be done in the odd respite.
She had lately let herself be named to the New World Advisory—they were gathering a consensus on this matter of whether the New World would physically support them. It was this question that would shape the larger one, the question of staying or going, so it wasn’t a light matter. Two or three more generations of people must finish their lives out and die on board the old, deteriorating Miller, if they gave up the idea of making a niche for themselves on this cold-weather planet and went on looking for another place more amenable.
It was her charge to listen to what people had to say in the committees of Pacema, Bonveno, Revenana. Farms and Waterworks and Science Committees she was seeing ahead of others, but in the end she must see all of them, even Fiber Arts Committees and potters, who would be thinking the point at issue was whether this New World had good seed hairs and stems for weaving, malleable clay for pots.
Eight people had been asked to be on the New World Advisory, their names settled on by agreement of the district clerks. Kristina, when she saw that five of the eight were old people, wondered if the clerks were thinking age was the same thing as wisdom. She didn’t quite believe this herself, having known some foolish old people and some sensible children, but she thought people could turn a long life to good account if they worked at it a little. She wasn’t unwilling to have this weighty work given to her. But there was a vanishing four-month window for making up their minds about it—it was a work that shouldn’t be put off for plagues of illness, she felt.
In Pacema, there were forty people stricken; in Kristina’s domaro, five. The sick people had a pungent, stinking urine; their kidneys ached; they took fever and lay weakly in bed, craving water and complaining of burning behind the eyes and on the tongue; and when they’d been sick for seven or eight or nine days, some few died and others began to be well again. No one in Kristina’s domaro had yet died. Or only old Edita Salvera who probably would have died soon anyway, she had gotten to be more than ninety years old and in the last few months had slipped into a kind of dream, calling her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren by the names of friends who had been dead for twenty years. Edita, when she took the fever into her body, simply fell into sleep and peacefully let go of life.
Grace of God, people said of Edita’s death, which made Kristina twist her mouth in irritation. She wanted to be mindful and attentive when she went out of her body. She had an abiding curiosity about the moment of death and considered it a loss to die in one’s sleep, ignorant, oblivious. But her irritation had more to do with platitudes than with God. She never had blamed or credited God for things that happened in the world, though it was hard not to hold Someone accountable for all this bad timing.
The accident of chronology had brought a persistent, widespread feeling that these particular microbes had come inside the Miller by way of Luza and Bjoro, though none of the six in the Ruby had come down sick, and the Miller always had been prone to epidemics. The population of micro-organisms always had been lively, capricious, unpredictable—in times past, this was blamed on the humid environment and irradiation and the two-thousand-some people living as close to one another as the pages in a book. But now, with a kind of plaintive urgency, people were blaming the New World. Ruby Fever, people were calling this new illness, and no one wanted Luza Kordoba treating the sick members of their family, though Luza always had been a well-respected kura.
It would have been hard enough work to make up their minds quickly without a plague delivered into the breach. Better the brakes than the spurs, was a well known axiom, and some problematic questions had gone undecided on the Dusty Miller for a hundred years, awaiting unity. Consensus was a method that was understood to be inefficient, cumbrous. It slowed down the introduction of new ideas, made sure that change was well-considered. No one had any experience with decisions that couldn’t be put off.
In the press of God’s bad timing, Kristina had become impatient with sleep. She had got in the habit of napping once in the daylight, once or twice in the night, and sitting under a lamp while other people were sleeping, holding a magnifying glass over pages of cryptic balloon data, Minutes of Planning Committees, replies to old Advices and Queries. Her own apartment at night was still, empty, no one objected to the light or railed about an old woman ill-using her body. Her son had made a frenzied mission of overhauling the steel mill robotics; he seldom slept in the house. Juko kept away too, was sleeping in her brother’s house where someone—Naĵa, the sister-in-law?—was sick and the old man, Juko’s father, had a dementia and needed habitual looking after.
This had given Kristina’s neighbors something to gossip about: Maybe Bjoro was working too hard out of a guilty conscience, something to do with his bringing home the plague in his body; and maybe Juko stayed away from her husband because she was afraid to catch a sickness from him. Or maybe she had a guilt of her own—her brother might have scolded her for always, in the past, leaving the old man, old Ŝilko, for him to watch. Of course, there was other gossip as well—neighbors had heard the whispered arguing and crying the night Bjoro came home in the Ruby—but Kristina kept herself from listening to it. She didn’t know fully what was between her son and her daughter-in-law anyway, only that it had become thick, a shroud, and when both of them were in the apartment it had filled the rooms, silenced them all, kept them from looking in one another’s faces. The plague had been a kind of bitter deliverance from that, perhaps one of God’s small graces, the timing not off after all.
She turned the pages of the bound Minute book slowly, her watery eyes peering among the endless tedious arguments and petty deliberations of the Bonveno Planning Committee. A man Kristina knew, Gilberto Osborn, was the recording clerk, and he had a neat small hand but a compulsion to write everything down. There were long, irreducible harangues from people whose words would finally carry little weight, and people who would stand aside or be discounted when the sense of the Meeting was gathered up. She had to read pages to find the scarce words of clearness, of judgment, the communal leadings, the congruences. She always had had a short patience for drivel, and from too much reading of Minutes lately she had maybe become intolerant. It wasn’t Gil Osborn’s fault there were stupid people living in Bonveno district, she thought, but he shouldn’t have written down their words. And the clerk over there in Bonveno, Toma something-or-other, shouldn’t have let them go on talking after it was clear they weren’t saying anything with depth or insight.
She pushed her knuckles against her eyes, a pleasant burning pain. Oh hell. She stood effortfully and went out of her apartment and down to the lavejo, as much for relief of tedium and stiff joints as relief of the little pressure on her bladder. The toilet box gave up a thin smell of rot and sweetness, a composting perfume she secretly savored, and once there she made herself comfortable on the seat and waited for a slow, small bowel movement. What’s the matter with them, over there in Bonveno? she thought irritably. When at last she stood up from the toilet seat, a tiredness settled suddenly into her chest and her pelvis. When she came out from the lavejo and saw the small yellow circle of the lamp in her apartment illuminating the loose stacks of papers, her flattened cushion, her magnifying glass, she thought Oh hell, and put out the light and got into bed.
For a while against her closed eyelids there were dim traces on the darkness, the neat handwriting of Gil Osborn. But she wasn’t able to apply her mind to those serious matters; she went helplessly over and over the trifling things in her day—the sorting of the Saldados’ unfamiliar laundry, an unfinished piece of drafting, the words she had traded back and forth with her nephew about the sexing of chicken eggs. Why are there so many stupid people over there in Bonveno? she kept thinking uselessly. In the apartment occupied by Filisa Ilmen’s family, some couple began to copulate—the little huffing of the man’s breath broke the first delicate skin of Kristina’s sleep. In the undefended moment she was struck with gr
ief, and thought suddenly, heavily, Who can know what he was thinking?
She went round irresistibly in the early morning to see Luza Kordoba, where she lived over in Senlima. There was a heavy mist along the incurvature so the houses down in those neighborhoods were in fog. Because the gray mornings made her glum, she went above the warm drizzle, keeping to the narrow footway at the edge of the ceiling. Walking up there along the high curve, she was sometimes prone to see the world in a bad way—to catch sight of it suddenly as tubular, meager, ersatz. But she was too tired, today, for farsightedness: The view across the long roofs, the heads of the light poles standing above the fog, was utterly familiar, without the capacity for surprise.
She didn’t know which house was Luza’s and had to ask a person pruning a tree and then two people cooking on a brazier on the high narrow pasado of the domaro where people had sent her. Senlima houses were down along the maltejo in a tight cluster, with the terraces of their fields climbing up either side. The domaro that Luza Kordoba lived in was built at the edge of the maltejo aqueduct, and Luza and her brother’s family and her spouse had a house with a view through the legs of trees that stood higher up on the slope.
Kristina climbed slowly up the stairs to them in their treetrunk house, standing on every second or third step to press a fist behind one hip where she was aching. Then she had to go from apartment to apartment looking for Luza until she’d found her, she and the woman who must have been her spouse, sitting puzzling over the parts of a little motor, maybe it was a refrigerator motor, that was neatly arrayed on the floor between them. Luza’s foot rocked slightly, working the treadle of a cradle where a sick little child slept ruddy-faced, wheezing. The room was a storm of disorder. A strung hammock had become a landing stage for disheveled bedding and towels, unwashed clothing. The table was adrift with unrelated things—a dirty shirt, greasy cutlery, a tangled wad of yarn stuck through with needles.