by Molly Gloss
On Luizo’s agenda was a long report to do with the New World’s zonal soils, and Celia Fuĝinaka read this aloud, not every word of it but the gist. Some of it people already knew: There were great tracts of lifeless sands and gravels, moraines and glacial outwash and the abandoned diluvium of transient lakes—a dead and stony lithosol—and vast ice-scoured and stream-eroded slopes with immature soil profiles. There was mature soil under the grasslands and in the shallow valleys, but typically the A horizon was thin and gray, leached of iron and aluminum, with the minerals deposited in a dense hardpan in the illuviated B horizon. Short summers and low temperatures and the soil’s sharp acidity discouraged the biological process: The layer of humus was a discrete and undecayed litter of stems and twigs, leaves, petals of flowers, the mummified remains of insects and small rodents. The Geological Arts and Sciences Committee had been saying that if people tilled the grasslands soil it would quickly lose its scant organic content and the loose silt would blow off on the wind. It was this committee which had been sending down to Farms Committees a steady procession of Queries to do with cultivation. The Alaŭdo Farms Committee, Ĉejo knew, had been sending back a steady string of Advices, ranging from digging-sticks and peat-drills to very ancient, cautiously provident strategies of slash-and-burn.
But now the people studying soils had got through looking at all the new information from the balloon surveys and they wanted people to know: There were intrazonal soils in the depressions of glaciated plains, in bogs and marshes underlain by thermal basins. The heat and dampness in those places encouraged decay, and so the soil in the wetlands was enriched with the remains of grasses, sedges, rotting marsh plants. Where the C horizon was clay or loam, the soil scientists thought the valleys could be drained and made tillable. They had sent a Query to both the Designs Committee and the Waters Committee, asking those people to look at feasible plans for drainage fields.
A few times people interrupted Celia to ask questions or make comments. Had the Ceramics Committee been brought into this planning? someone wanted to know. After all, what was a drain tile but a big piece of pottery? Someone else said, well, there were other ways of draining a field, metal pipes and tubes—wouldn’t it make sense to just adapt and relocate the systems that were already in place on the Dusty Miller? Had the engineers thought of that? And inevitably, two or three confused people wanted to talk about the difficulties of living above a marshland—would houses be prone to sinking? would people be able to walk across the ground without fear of falling down a mud hole? But this was a report, not a Query, so Luizo tried to keep everyone from too much turning aside.
When Ulfo Amsfred began his habitual stump speech—“We’ll have a much harder time down there, no matter if this drainage works. There’ll be more deaths, we’ll have to work harder, life will be more dangerous—” Luizo made use of it to shift the talk away from soil, bringing up a question sent over to them from Monthly Meeting, this matter of whether they ought to give up trying to make the New World amenable—whether they ought to build a biosphere flat on the ground there.
“They want to know what we think, in general. And then the questions that would have to be addressed if we began to plan seriously to do this.” He said “theriouthly,” pushing the tip of his tongue against the cleft in his upper lip.
Knuto Mursawa’s words—We live in this world as in the body of God—had long since gone clear around the ŝiro—all the ŝiroj. People were ready to speak to the question. If this had been a Meeting for Worship they might have waited, might have expected a reasonable silence to give weight to their words, but old Karla Asida stood quickly and said with fierce heat, “This work we’ve already done, all this research and planning on how to live on the New World, I suppose that’s all wasted, then, if we build a roof and live under it, eh?” She looked around at them resentfully, as if the research and the planning were all work she had personally accomplished, and the idea of a biosphere was a personal affront to her efforts.
Ĉejo didn’t know what he felt about the biosphere plan, but he saw other people giving back Karla’s look without speaking. No one thought she was raising an important issue. At the edge of his mind, Ĉejo began to repeat, theriouthly addrethed theriouthly addrethed, his tongue following his brain, pushing against the front of his teeth in a reflex of silence that mimicked Luizo’s delicate lisp.
Hugo Lagrimas stood and said, “It’s one thing to keep a closed system like the Miller running along without too much trouble, but building one is another thing, eh? We’ve got a smithy that makes steel for needles and knives, and they turn out a new light pole now and then, little machine parts, tools and whatnot. We haven’t got the know-how, haven’t got the raw goods or the machinery—have we?—to build a thing like this”—he gestured broadly with his two hands, a motion that took in the whole of the Miller’s metalline sky—“this big and difficult.”
Ruben Bera, old Pata Vilasenor’s son, had arthritis in his hips—people didn’t expect him to trouble his body to stand up. From where he sat on the floor of the loĝio, he said, “They’re thinking that we could dismantle the Miller and move it piecemeal down to the ground, that’s what I heard.”
Luizo said, “Is that right?” and looked at Laŭdia Ortega. Laŭdia’s brother was a design scientist, an engineer. None of the people living in this domaro were scientists; for that kind of wisdom and apprising, they had to ask people in other houses, other family members and neighbors.
Laŭdia said, nodding, “Not a part-for-part rebuilding, but reusing the materials, anyway, the joists and sheathing, in a new architecture.”
Someone murmured irritably, “Well, they ought to have said so in the first place. What kind of a Query is it that doesn’t lay out the circumstances of things?” Someone else answered this, but the only part of it that Ĉejo heard was the naming of Isaba Aguto, clerk of the Alaŭdo Monthly Meeting.
Their own experience was with small projects of farming and transport, small constructions of plumbing and electronics—they didn’t have the knowledge for arguing—but they started blindly down the path, raising questions of engineering and technology, general difficulties they imagined might come from dismantling the Miller and reassembling it on the New World. Would people go on living inside the Miller in the early part of this project? What would be the living conditions for people working down there on the New World, building the new place? There would be excess heat, surely, from the taking apart of the toroid—how were the engineers thinking this heat would be discharged? Maybe a land-bound biosphere wouldn’t need an absolutely closed system; maybe it would benefit from an exchange of air, of water, with the New World’s own envelope? There must be particular tools and machinery needed for taking this big structure apart; would they first need to devise, build, test, perfect, the very means themselves?
Luizo spoke every little while, keeping people from too much arguing, keeping them from following a question too far. “All we’re about, is to flag the stones in this field,” he kept saying.
Eventually, Pata Vilasenor stood alongside her son and said, “What is the point of taking the Miller apart and rebuilding it down there? If we’re going to go on living under a roof, shouldn’t we just go on living right here? I think it’s crazy, this scheme. And going down to live on the New World, that’s crazy too. If the Maintenance Committee thinks this torus will last another fifty years or one hundred, then maybe we should let our grandchildren be the ones to worry about finding a new place to live. If we’re going to go on living under a roof, we ought to just stay right where we are, is what I think, where old people with tired hearts can move up on the altejo, eh? and go on living easily. And people with arthritis can go on without the weight getting into their bones.”
Maybe Ruben was sorry to have his mother bringing up his unlucky health in this sideways manner. His face became bright; he looked intently into the palms of his hands. His mother went on without seeing this, saying, “If we go down there—under a roof or not—many
of us will die, it’ll be a hard life, like Ulfo always is harping on. On that New World, I think Ulfo is not far off, I think we’ll have a hard time of it.” She looked around at her neighbors doggedly. “I don’t see why we need to come out in the sunlight. We’re doing pretty well, after all. It’s like Knuto Mursawa said: This place is an Eden, it’s the body of God. Only he didn’t take it far enough. We ought to just stay right here, inside God’s body, that’s what I think.”
Pata’s leading turned them in a new direction. Instead of going on arguing about steel manufacture and know-how, Irma Lindberg slowly stood and gave them her own reasons for wanting to abide in the old Dusty Miller, a complicated argument to do with people on this world having to be mindful of every detail of their living environment, their souls and minds put to work always in keeping the whole world from collapsing, every act an act of conscious worship—for what else was it but worship, eh? loving and protecting this soil, these trees, these animals, against the void of space. Irma thought their ceaseless life-giving work made them completely and fruitfully human. On the Miller, she said, there were certain human potentialities that hadn’t been in reach of people on the Earth.
This seemed both mad and rational to Ĉejo—irresistibly appealing. A quietness settled into all of them. Maybe other people, like Ĉejo, were waiting for sense or understanding to come out of the two women’s speaking.
When Humberto made a small noise, a meaningless sound, Ĉejo’s family ignored this distraction as if it had nothing to do with them. His grandmother’s eyes were shut, her mouth in a pucker of concentration. She had a longstanding fear of leaving the Miller, and a longstanding resolve to live long enough to accomplish it. Ĉejo wondered: Did she think this planet-bound biosphere stood at the intersection? Ĉejo’s grandfather, old Petro, sat beside his wife, his hands clasped behind his neck and his elbows pointing downward; he stared along them as if he sighted down an azimuth to the floor. A morbid torpor was in his face. Probably he wasn’t thinking about people’s leadings but yielding to his recent habit: sighting down the short end of his life. Alfhilda’s face was creased and intent. When she saw Ĉejo looking toward her, she rolled her lower lip down thoughtfully, displaying a pink gum.
Sesilo Hurtado got slowly to his feet. Sesilo was married to Alfhilda’s mother’s sister. He was known for a certain stew he liked to make, of sweet potatoes and eggplant, tomatoes, summer squash, ground peanuts, and seasoned with ginger, garlic, coriander. In Ĉejo’s family, this stew was moderately famous. “Where there’s a hardship,” he said, “generally there’s a grace to be found in it,” and people nodded, as if Sesilo had said something they all understood to be true. “On that world, eh? it’s all hardship, and I wonder: What is the saving grace?” He looked around at his neighbors before offering them his own considered answer: Maybe that marginal landscape would force them all to economy, frugality, where a rich world might make them prodigal. There were old, historical understandings, available to anybody who would read the old books: Humans tended to be destructive exactly in proportion to their belief in abundance. It was people of meager lands who had gone on longest, on the Earth, holding to an economy of sharing and of thrift. “Maybe it’s in a bare-bones existence that we’d be enriched,” Sesilo said. “Maybe the hardships would be a good thing.”
After Sesilo had spoken, Pia Putala stood and said that hardship was the sort of thing people liked to romanticize and think about endlessly, but there were plenty of hardships everywhere. “We don’t need to go down to the New World to find hardship,” she told them, indicating their own world with her hand.
Someone else said, Sesilo’s argument about the destructiveness of humans might be a reason for them to keep to themselves, up here in the Miller. If people carried the possibility of apocalypse inside them, shouldn’t they seclude themselves behind barriers?
People had finally come around to what the question was, and they went on speaking to it without the clerk needing to keep them to a center path. “The New World, it’s forbidding of people—all that cold and the long days, the stony soil. This place, the Miller, at least it’s made for people, eh? as the New World was not.” “This world we’ve made in the Miller, it’s simpler by orders of magnitude than any natural world—we can keep it going ourselves, it’s not confusing to us.” “We’ve got a life and death reliance on each other, right here, eh? It’s our hardships binds us together.”
Until recently, Ĉejo had had a habit of not listening to much that was discussed at a Meeting for Business—it was always tiresomely repetitious. People always were bringing up questions of sanitation and repair, arguing whether a diseased tree ought to be cut down, and what should be planted in the vacated space. He would often drowse dully, or wander in daydream. When there was a matter that concerned him, he fidgeted restlessly, waiting for it through tedious negligible discussions. But these days, everything circled endlessly around the New World. There were always Advices and Queries from Monthly Meeting, and matters people felt had been overlooked by Quarterly or Yearly Planning Committees. Lately, Ĉejo kept his attention scrupulously focused, and cast around in his mind for an opinion on every question. When the issues had to do with farming, sometimes his mouth opened and words came out—this, he had lately realized, was what people meant by The Inner Voice.
He didn’t have an impulse to speak on this matter of how to live well and where to do it, but he wanted to hear every word spoken, and Humberto went on restless and noisy, shifting and banging his left leg, his left hand, and muttering meaningless phrases. Ĉejo became restless himself. He and Alfhilda exchanged glances. If he gave up sitting with Udo Blades and went over there where his father was, nothing would be accomplished by it—he didn’t have a gift for quieting his father’s noisy outbreaks—but he suffered from dim guilt, as if it was in his power to put an end to the distraction. He wanted someone who was already sitting over there, his grandmother or Heza or Alfhilda, even old Petro, to bring his father inside the house, so people could go on with the Meeting without this noisy commotion. In the same long braid with guilt was something like embarrassment, and aggravation.
For a while his family went on ignoring Humberto, but finally Heza began to whisper to him and then to Leona, and finally, when no one was speaking and Humberto’s steady muttering was filling up everybody’s silence, Ĉejo’s grandmother stood up to pull at her son’s arms. Heza helped her, and they got him standing. But then Leona looked out at people and said, pushing her lower teeth forward, “My son, Humberto, wants to speak to this Meeting.”
People turned their heads in surprise. Ĉejo’s father was braced on his left leg, his right leg trailing heavily useless, the fingers of his right hand curled like a flower against his thigh, and the two old women were standing there steadying him in their arms. His mouth was loose at the right corner, the shine of spit on his chin. His long eyes were unpaired, the one moving restlessly and the other staring, a vitreous bubble in a sagging fold of eyelid—maybe that eye was sightless. His mother kept his hair untangled and clean, but he never would sit quietly for it to be cut; it hung in a ragged curtain over his brows, caught in his eyelashes. His look was ferocious, pitiful.
His mouth shaped two words with agonizing care, two meaningless sounds, something like, Forbar! Ardo! Some people looked at him gravely and some other people looked away. Ĉejo studied his own hands, the line of black under a thumbnail—a horizon of soil. There was a long, following silence. Silence was a language people understood, and an expectancy and patience began to find its center in the stillness. Ĉejo went on looking at his hands, but then, irresistibly, he looked at his father. Humberto’s working eye was moving among the faces of his neighbors, focused on someone, and then someone else, and someone else. When the eye came around finally to him, Ĉejo was surprised by it. His father’s look behind the scrim of his uncut bangs was tender and reasonable, entering into the silence.
He felt suddenly at the edge of something—an abyss, or a continent.
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br /> Humberto grappled again with his tongue, and his urgent whisper when it came out was meaningless and unknowable, but the feeling in it overleaped consciousness, passed into Ĉejo’s brain as a vivid, feverish intuition. He thought, What is a human being for? imagining this, or something equally solemn, something that reverberated through all the nights and days of their lives, must be what his father was asking them all. In the silence afterward, while people were considering Humberto’s impenetrable question, Leona took a better hold of her son and closed her eyes. Heza, on his other side, fixed her look somewhere indefinite, somewhere in the center of the stillness.
Ĉejo understood that something had come onto the loĝio with Humberto’s painfully achieved words, his unknown syllables, and that people were waiting to see what it was. And when his father began again, pressing on them his mysterious, necessary truths in hidden phrases, fluent silences, then the thing all of them were waiting for seemed to enter into his voice, where it became familiar, became allusive, and Ĉejo wondered how he had ever thought there was but a single pronunciation in the sound of a word. He thought Humberto was speaking to them in his own language or theirs, in the bones of their ears or in their blood, his words a sigh.
Are we thinking we’ve created something? he was saying. Are we thinking, because we’ve put ourselves and some other creatures inside a container, that this container we’ve made is Eden? There’s only one Creation, eh? and we’re among its members. What is this torus except a smaller circle within a larger one? Are we thinking we can go on living forever inside the little circle of each other’s arms, without returning? without joining ourselves to the cosmos? without letting our arms open to touch the arms of the rest of Creation? What is this torus except a solitude? There isn’t any meaning in anything except in its relations with other things—what is the anther of a flower except in its relations with the bee, eh? And what is the meaning of people who have uprooted themselves from ancient soil and are trying to go on living in a container of air and water, separate from the rest of the Creation? What is that meaning except a skeleton of bones from which the soul has escaped?