Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

  “A chessel,” Thenike said, pointing.

  It was a wooden cheese vat. Thenike leaned her pole up against a whitewashed wall and pulled off the gauzy cloth covering, sending a gust of sharp not‑quite‑cheese smell in Marghe’s direction. In the vat, the whey looked scummy, rancid, like the sky.

  “This is where we make butter and cheese, and store what milk we don’t use on any day.” She slid the stone lid off a good‑sized bowl. “Yeast. For the bread.” She slid it back. “Through here are the vegetables.” There were mounds of roots and tubers, leaves drying in bunches and bulbs hanging from the roof. Thenike reached into a barrel, pulled out a small, round fruit, sniffed it. “Soca. Here. Can you smell the spice? That means it’s not ready yet. We pick them at the end of the Moon of Shelters, leave them here in the dark until they’re ready. When they’re ready they smell terrible, like bad feet, but they taste like rain after a drought, like wind on a calm sea.”

  To Marghe it seemed that the storage cellar was full with enough to feed a thousand people for a year, and it occurred to her that she had never really seen whole‑food storage before. At Port Central, there was probably more protein, more vitamins, stored in a tenth this space, all in the form of concentrates, flash‑frozen choice cuts, and prepeeled mixes.

  The chessel sky was wrapped right around the sun by the time they emerged. A cold wind bowled snow dust along the paths, Marghe’s scars ached. She shivered. Here she was in Ollfoss, the place she had been traveling toward for two years in order to… study the people like shells found on a beach. She was not sure she wanted to do that anymore. Suddenly she was not sure about anything anymore, and that was frightening. If she did not want to do what she had set out to do, then what did she want? Something had changed. Some part of her was gone.

  “Marghe? Are you well?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Lean on me. It’s not far.” The arms that Thenike wrapped around her waist for support were strong and hard. Marghe wanted to lean into them and weep for what she had lost, though she did not know whether her loss was good or bad, or even real. Instead, she started the painful walk back to the guest room.

  She allowed Thenike to help her into bed, grateful when the viajera stooped to add wood to the carefully banked fire and stoked it into a blaze. When she turned back to Marghe, her face was ruddy. “That should keep you warm. Do you need anything else?”

  Stay with me, Marghe wanted to say. Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts. “No.”

  “Then I’ll check on you later.”

  Marghe was tired. The fire was hot. She fell asleep.

  In her dream, she walked along a long, bleak shore littered with bladderwrack and feathers and seashells. Someone was down by the surf. Thenike. She held something out to Marghe, something hard and bright, crusted with wet sand. A chambered nautilus. “Do you see, Marghe,” she said, opening it as though it were on a hinge, “shells are not empty.” Chamber after gleaming chamber was filled with soft, wet life. Such a fragile and beautiful thing. Precious. Then the shell and Thenike were gone, and Marghe was running up and down the beach, listening desperately for the cries of her mother, who was trapped inside one of the shells and being swept away on the tide.

  But something caught her attention, something dark and wet, gleaming in a nest of seaweed. She stooped for it. A fossilized shell, an ammonite. It was cold and heavy in her maimed hand, like stone. But her mother was being swept away. You can’t lose me now, it whispered, you’ve onty just found me. And while she watched, it sank into her palm and disappeared. When she looked up, all the other shells were gone.

  Marghe jerked awake. Her left hand was numb; she had slept on it. She shook it until it began to tingle, shivered as her sweat dried. She remembered her dream, the fossilized shell…

  Or do you just study people like shells found on a beach? Thenike’s question had passed Marghe’s barriers and gone deep; it demanded an honest answer. To herself, at least.

  Very well.

  She had lived alone for as long as she could remember, her father and mother had always been so busy. She had buried herself in study, in observation and analysis. People were there to be watched, not related to. And now her mother was dead and her father estranged, and she had no friends. She had no friends, because whenever she began to get close to someone it felt like unknown territory, and it scared her; she ran away to a new place, to find new people to study, people to whom she did not necessarily have to be a person back.

  To be a person back. She was not sure she knew how.

  She was staring at the coverlet, trying to digest that revelation, when Thenike came back.

  “How are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Thenike sat on the end of the bed. “What is it?”

  Marghe did not dare look up from the coverlet. But she had to talk to someone about this, make it real. “There are some things I haven’t told you.” So many things.“About my mother. About what happened to my face.” She touched her nose, the break that only she could see. “About… about why I feel so alone.”

  Thenike took her hand. “You’re not alone. I’m listening.”

  “Sometimes… sometimes I feel that all I’ve got is my job. I study people, that’s who I am: studier of people. What you said this morning was true. I treat people like interesting specimens, not like humans. And I do it because… because I don’t know how else to behave. It’s as though all I am is my job. All I am is an empty shell. I look all right from a distance, but up close there’s nothing there, nothing behind the pretty whorls and brittle exterior. But I don’t have that job anymore. No shell. But If I don’t have that, then what do I have?”

  She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, sinking heavy and solid, complete, into the bones of her hand.

  “What did you have before your job?”

  Slowly, Marghe told Thenike about how her mother, Acquila, had been an anthropologist before her, how Marghe had taken up the studies because it was a way to be close to her mother when she wasn’t there, which was often. She told her about Company. About her beating. About the death of her mother and her fear of the virus.

  It was not everything, not nearly everything, but it was a start.

  They were sitting peacefully, watching the fire, when Gerrel came in with lunch for herself and Marghe.

  Thenike looked up. “That smells good.”

  “There’s some left in the kitchen. Do you want me to get it for you?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Here, then. You two start in on these and I’ll bring another bowl for me.”

  “If you put them by the fire, they’ll stay warm. We’ll wait for you to rejoin us,” Marghe said. She suddenly needed the company of this unconcerned child and the woman who denied she was wise. She felt depressed and uncertain, not yet ready to be alone with her new and fragile thoughts.

  Marghe and Thenike talked every day. Marghe learned of linn cloud, the waterfall cloud in multilayers which brought very heavy rain; of n’gus, queen daggerhorn, sky–stately and slow‑moving like the beasts of the forest; of pilwe sky, soft, white undulating cloud that could hide the sun for a whole moon.

  She did not know what Thenike learned, but Marghe told her of coming to Jeep, of the trata agreement with Cassil in Holme Valley, of how Holle and Shill had lent her Pella and given her the knife that helped keep her alive. She spent one whole afternoon talking about Aoife.

  “She made this for me”–she showed Thenike the palo–“but she hit me more than once. Sometimes she treated me like I wasn’t human, but sometimes… Thenike, I know she cared! Sometimes I think she came to care more for me than she had done for anyone for a long time. But she wouldn’t let me go. There was one time when I thought she might, I really thought… I tried to ask why. But it was as though she was two people. The tribe, the tribe, nothing but the tribe. It was all she knew. I just didn’t matter to her, in the end. I belonged to the tribe, I was subhuman, even though everyth
ing in her heart told her otherwise. How can people do that?”

  “Perhaps she did what she could to help.”

  “She was my jailer.”

  “She taught you how to survive.”

  “So that I could be a good and productive member of the tribe!”

  “Nonetheless.”

  Marghe brushed that aside impatiently, winced as her healing hands banged on the edge of her cot. “She kept me like a caged animal. Until I didn’t know who I was anymore. Thenike, there were days on Tehuantepec when I wished Uaithne would kill me, just to end everything. No, that’s not true. I didn’t care enough about anything to even bother to actively want anything. I just didn’t care, I was nothing. A blank. Have you ever felt like that? It’s the most terrible thing in the world.” She was crying, but did not bother to brush away her tears. “I nearly didn’t try to run, when I had the chance. I saw the fire and the first thing I thought was, Why bother to run, why not go back, at least it’ll be warm.” She laughed, heard the pain in it. “And you know what the worst thing is? I thought, It won’t be fair to Aoife if I run away. Not fair to Aoife. How can I live with that?”

  “But you did decide to live.”

  “Yes. I did, didn’t I. I wonder why.”

  “Do you think it matters why?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She was quiet awhile. “It was hard, Thenike. I had to fight and fight and fight. All the time. When my compass broke. When I escaped. Through the blizzard. To keep moving, to get to the trees. To keep living. There has to be a powerful reason to stay alive through all that.”

  “You’re a survivor.”

  “I don’t know what I am.” She wiped away the tears that were drying, cold, on her cheeks. “I don’t want to be Marghe the anthropologist who examines seashells on the beach and moves on. I don’t think I am her anymore. But I don’t know who I want to be.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  Marghe thought carefully. “Yes.”

  “Then in a few days, when you’re stronger, there’s something you can do that might help you find out.”

  It was the last day of the Moon of Silence, and the air was still and cold. The structure that sheltered the gong stood near the edge of the forest. It was rough, four timber posts holding up a shingled roof, and lay open to any woman of Ollfoss who might walk by. None did. This was Marghe’s place for the next day and night.

  Marghe, tented inside her felt cloak, knelt on the patch of moss she had swept free of snow and contemplated the gong. It hung from the roof by two weathered ropes and was made of hammered metal that caught the light like copper but turned buttery silver in the center where the hammer dents of its making were almost worn smooth from generations of use. Thin morning light cast a blurred reflection of her face onto its uneven surface. Like a moon.

  She studied the pale silent face before her, remembering Aoife naming the moons. Moon of Silence: Aoife’s name for this month of midwinter; now Marghe’s name for her own face.

  The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who lived on Earth were unaware that they lived on a gigantic gong that boomed out exactly sixty‑nine times every day. On Gallipoli, a much smaller body that pulsed more frequently, the colonists were equally unaware. Here on Jeep, the people knew. Three times a year–before sowing the gardens with their seed and bulbs, when the fruits and grains were ripening, and as the last of the harvest was being gathered–a woman of Ollfoss was chosen to sit by the gong all day and all night, sounding it in time to the pulse of the world. The rhythm, Thenike said, helped the crops. It would also help Marghe; if she could still herself enough to hear, she would learn what she needed to know of herself.

  Extended meditation. Marghe knew it would not be sound that she would hear through her ears, but something she would sense, as she had the Tehuantepec stones. She sat by the gong and breathed gently, slowly, long, long inhalations and steady exhalations, and sank her awareness down into her own electromagnetic field; when this world rang, her body would tell her.

  At the right moment, when she felt her lungs would fill forever with the no‑longer‑alien sticky resin smell of green and dirt and small mammals’ nests, when it seemed the world waited for just a brief hitch of time, when she heard and felt and was the electromagnetic pulse of Jeep, its laugh, its breath, she rose up onto her knees, lifted the wooden rod she held in her right hand and struck the gong with the padded end. Vibration seeped through Ollfoss like the smell of grass after rain, resonating with the pulse of the world, its heartbeat. She sat back down on her heels. Long after the sound faded, she sensed the air humming as the gong quivered on its ropes.

  The metal’s vibration slowed. She sat and breathed and watched the reflection of her face reform. The reflection watched her back.

  She was not who she had been. Like dull, raw glass in the hands of a skilled blower, she had become something different. Something cold, brilliant, and still. On her left hand were two fingers, a thumb, and two scars. The face that had been beaten into a different shape on Beaver carried new marks. Once again it was no longer her face.

  She contemplated that while she listened to the waiting green silence of Moanwood, to the slow breath of the world: the muscle of its dirt, the bones of its rock, the blood of its seas. She heard the world humming deep in its throat, and when it rang with its soft pulse, she leaned forward to strike the gong.

  Again and again her face shivered to splinters; again and again it re‑formed.

  Marghe knew that this meant something: she listened to the world with her body; she hit the gong; her new face swam apart and came back together.

  Strike the gong.

  They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part. The world was telling her: her blood, the tides in her cells, and the fluctuations in her nerves already beat to its rhythm, just as they had once resonated to the electromagnetic surges of Earth. Her body rang with this world. She had a place here; she could take it up, if she chose.

  Strike the gong.

  Marghe drank down the cold, still air, felt it suck heat from her lungs. She expelled it gently through her mouth in a deliberate cloud of breath crystal that dulled the surface of the gong. Her mark.

  She raised her head. The sky was covered with endless round humps of dark cloud, like a shoal of blue‑backed salmon broaching the sea, poised forever before diving. A nerka sky. Those clouds were made of her breath and the breath of a million women who had made peace with the world; women she had set out to study, like seashells.

  No longer.

  It was possible now for her to put aside that person she had been and choose to accept Thenike, or Cassil or Holle and Shill, even Danner and Lu Wai and Letitia Dogias, as nothing more and nothing less than equals from whom she could learn and derive comfort, to whom she could offer advice or a strong hand. If she chose.

  Strike the gong.

  She struck it harder than she needed to and set it dancing on its rope. The sound clashed and jarred around the clearing. Choose, it seemed to be saying. Choose. But there was no real choice; that decision was made already. All she had to do was accept it: Jeep the world, Jeep the virus, would become part of her now whether she wanted it or not. There was not enough FN‑17 to last her back to Port Central. Even if she was fit enough to travel, even if the tribes and their feud were not making it impossible to cross Tehuantepec, even if the weather didn’t mean no ships could make the passage south until the Moon of the Aches, there was not enough. There was not enough. The virus was going to invade her, cell by cell, sliding cold fingers into her cells and curling around her genes. She would never get rid of it. Never.

  She could stop taking the FN‑17 voluntarily, let Jeep in with open arms. It was coming anyway. This way she could prepare herself. It might make a difference, Thenike said; she might stand a better chance of living if her mind was not fighting her body, if s
he was struggling toward the possible, toward staying alive, rather than fighting for the impossible, to keep the virus out, right out from under her skin.

  To make that choice, to voluntarily set aside the FN‑17, she would have to take a step into the unknown; she would have to step out from behind her professional persona and be naked, vulnerable. Herself.

  Marghe squirmed. Maybe she should keep taking the vaccine. After all, it was possible that Danner even now might be working miracles, might be establishing new relays, or moving satellites, or sending Mirrors north to track her SLJC. Then she could go up to Estradebefore the six months were over. She would not have the virus. She…

  No. All dreams. She would contract the virus; she would be infected and survive, or she would be infected and die. The rest was just details.

  Strike the gong.

  The face that re‑formed was gaunt and pale, and reminded her of her mother.

  At the back of all her fears lay her mother. Her mother coughing and sweating. Dying. There were no decisions to be made after dying.

  Her mother had died on the bed in the cottage’s spare room, the one that was not really big enough. She had lain there, looking as though she might still take a small tearing breath and start coughing again, and Marghe had waited, holding her own breath, hoping. But her mother remained quiet. Marghe had stood there for almost an hour, not believing what had happened. It had taken just three days to turn her mother from a laughing woman striding along the Welsh hillsides to this waxy, thin mannequin. There was nothing left of that vital, bright woman now, except the memories buried deep within her daughter.

  Marghe stared at the gong, at the pale, featureless reflection. If she died here, who would remember her, and how? She had been Marghe the SEC representative, or Marghe the vaccine guinea pig. No one knew Marghe the woman.