Aeon Fourteen

by Aeon Authors

  Did that mean he could go back? Key in one hand, helmet in the other? Hosehead turned it over in his hand, wondering how literal the lady had been about distilling ships from hope. This thing was real.

  But there wasn't any following pebblestorm, and Haven was still working triple shifts, so he tucked it away again. It's stayed tucked away ‘til this day. Who knows if he'll ever find call to use it, hey?

  No, I won't show it to you. Yes, you can check the station logs. It's all true, from some point of view or another.

  Moral?

  Listen, you little energy vortex. Not every story's got to have a moral. Lessons maybe. Don't abandon Ops, no matter what. Trust your instruments. Watch out for strange women in wood and brass spaceships. That enough damned morals for you?

  Make yourself useful. Go feed the eels down in the recycling tank.

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  Wild Among Hares

  by Sarah L. Edwards

  "I once read that a hare is nobler than a rabbit. Living within sight of another human being makes me feel crowded. Being an outcast long enough makes it hard to see the possibility of being anything else.

  This story is about all those things, and it's also a sequel of sorts to my story ‘The Butterfly Man,’ which appeared in Aeon 12."

  * * * *

  IT WASN'T FEAR that drove me to people, nor loneliness. It was hunger, aching dull and hollow, that took me knocking at this door or that one, offering my service. Though the housewives wore varying shades of kindness, none had work for me and none cared to ask me in. It was the hair, I suppose, gray, wiry stuff that wouldn't lie flat. Or my eyes, a bit jumpy and wrinkled around the edges from staring down the road too long. Or maybe it was my dress that left them uneasy, what with the streaks of sweat and dust and the fraying around the hem.

  The night air, blushing and coy and damp after the spring's first warmth, brought me smells of the outer places. As a girl I went where they led, seeking out hares, whiskered and mustached, and there I guarded their secrets and knew their pains. I strayed from the ways of people as long as I pleased. But wild things die young. Long ago I'd learned to wear the garb of mankind—when I needed it.

  At the last house I pulled the scarf tight over my silvered hair and shrugged, settling the hare deeper in his pocket in my shoulder-pack. I walked past a grazing pony to the dim-lit house, not much less shabby than I, and tapped the stranger's knock. In a moment, a beam of light slit the black slab of house, and a man stood shadowed in the doorway.

  “What's your business?”

  I held my token to the light: a hare's tail, dyed crimson.

  The man shook his head, but his tone was softer when he said, “No midwiving needed here, ma'am.”

  I opened my hands and started motioning, making the signs it seemed folks were readiest to understand as offers of work for food. Sewing? Skinning? Cooking? I hadn't much hope of the last, for the smells of a hearth fire were blowing out from the door.

  “I don't reckon we need your service,” he said.

  The hare at my back stirred, and a wisp of the scent in his nose came to mine as well. There was work here.

  I pointed beyond the man and cupped my hands at my stomach, and then held up the token again. I tapped my chest and motioned into the house.

  “You want to have a look at her?” said the man, hesitant. “Someone sent you, I guess.”

  I shrugged and stepped closer to the light.

  He put a hand to my shoulder and looked me up and down. “Not from nearby, are you?” The question was tentative, searching. I shook my head. “All right, then. If Renna doesn't mind. Come on in.” He pulled the door open wider and stepped aside to let me through.

  The woman leaned by the hearth, pulling at a kettle smelling of carrots and meat. The man was not so old as he looked, all sunburnt and weather-worn, but she was younger still, not much past first blood. As much a girl as a woman. As I walked in she straightened, and I saw what the hare smelled. Near time, not lacking more than a week. She stood in the way of a new-shorn sheep—not true afraid, but nervy, and not quite used to the new shape of back and legs and belly. Her first, then.

  A last breath of spring rushed in as the door swung shut behind me, and I couldn't help but start a little. Already I thirsted for open sky, but I held my place. It was an old thirst, and I'd work to do.

  I followed the man's motion to a stone bench at the table. We both were clumsy at it. Was he, then, no more used to house living than I? I thought of the pony out front. A traveler by trade—perhaps peddler or tinker.

  The woman brought over a pot of stew and served us each. Her movements were quick and silent. “It's a fine meal, Renna,” said the man, patting her hand. A brief smile, a flicker of light on the surface of a stream, crossed her face. Quickly her gaze fell to her plate, and did not lift again while we ate.

  When we'd finished, the man rose. “I'll mind the dishes. You women go ahead.”

  The woman—with my mind's way with names I'd already lost hers—she rose and made a nervous motion with her hands.

  “It's all right,” said the man. “She'll just look you over, is all.”

  She raised her hands again, but after a glance at me she dropped them and turned away, leading me past a curtain into the second room. I motioned her to undress. Though she paused, she didn't protest.

  Wake up, I whispered mind-wise to the hare. Work to do. The hare shifted from dozing weight to alert stillness on my back.

  When the woman had pulled off her dress, I walked closer and reached out my hands. She stepped back and twisted away, looking at me with eyes that were suddenly deadly still.

  I pulled my thoughts away from the hare and reached for the words I needed. They stuck like burrs in my mind so that I could barely pull them loose.

  “Won't hurt,” I mumbled.

  She frowned, and I wondered if I'd have to try again, but when I stepped forward this time she waited for me, and only shivered when I put my hands on her belly.

  For a moment I ignored the hare and used my hands to trace the curve of her womb, my fingers just grazing her skin as I looked for strange tightnesses or bulges, places that suggested trouble. I measured her hips with my hands. They were thin, but no so that I'd worry overmuch, just take care when the time came.

  The hare pushed at my thoughts and finally I let him in. My hands flat on her belly's swell, I knew two heartbeats, one rushing loud and the other faint but steady. I felt the whisper of a kick. I saw the girl—it was a girl—sleeping, waking, testing her legs’ strength with shoves and thrusts, sleeping again. She squirmed against movement, against varying depths of shadow, against the round confining walls of her world that swelled around her, finally bursting, collapsing upon her. Some three days hence, her mother's first pains struck.

  I gasped. The moment always surprised me, no matter how many times I felt it. I pulled my hands away and opened my eyes. The woman's were anxious, flicking across my face. I patted her hand and motioned for her to get dressed, while I stood back and caught my breath. As my thoughts cooled, I felt the hare's hunger, which always stirred when we worked. The rough beams overhead seemed to drop slowly lower, and the need for free air deepened.

  She didn't ask me questions, like first mothers usually did. She was silent as she shrugged into the clothing and gently arranged her hair. As she did a scrap of color lit beneath the brown, and flitted from the nape of her neck to the wall. A butterfly? I startled and glanced to her, but her face was blank, offering no explanation. The curtain trembled as she pushed it aside.

  What was it? What did she fear?

  I followed her, glancing back at the chink where the colored thing had landed and shrunk from sight.

  The woman was flashing hand-signs at the man as I walked in. Was her silence of
necessity, then? Perhaps her tongue was as stupid as my own. The man saw me and smiled faintly. “And how is she?”

  I smiled and held up my hands, motioning assurance. Yes, she was healthy, and the child, too. When I made the sign of a girl, the man laughed and pulled the woman closer. I took from my pockets my scraps of thin-scraped leather inked with pictures, and showed what she was to eat. Some of this herb every day. Always plenty of water.

  The woman's eyes softened as I made the motions, and her skittishness seemed to calm.

  I was finishing, telling them that I would return in a few days’ time to deliver the child, when another flash of color fluttered to the woman's hair—a butterfly, dressed in shades of gray and sulfur. Seeing my eyes on her, the woman stiffened. The man pushed her behind him and quickly bowed.

  “Thank you, midwife, for seeing she was all right. Now, I'm afraid I can't offer you bedding. Was the meal payment enough?”

  I nodded, and he smiled, some inner tension released. I pointed to the woman and held up three fingers. Then I bowed and walked to the door. Outside, I glanced once more to the woman, staring after me with something like terror in her eyes. Then the door closed in my face, and it was dark.

  Did you feel her fear? I asked the hare.

  Hungry.

  I laughed and tried to shrug away the tightness that had gathered around my shoulders. They hadn't guessed. How could they? Something had the girl spooked, but it wasn't me, and they wouldn't be sending out a warning. I was safe. And no longer hungry.

  I reached back and flipped open the flap, letting the hare poke his head into the night air while I headed across the barren hills to a stream I'd seen. The thirsty stand of brush that grew at its edge made a fine bed for a hare, or even a woman.

  As I settled under a sprawling bush, ghostly green with buds, and the hare hopped off to find food of his own liking, the play of her hands caught my thought again. The man had spoken to her, so nothing stopped her ears. It must have been only her mouth that failed her, for in those quick, fine-fingered movements there was some echo of my own stumbling explanations. But he'd understood. As sure as if she'd spoken, he'd understood.

  Some ache not unlike hunger settled in my chest. I curled tighter and waited to sleep.

  * * * *

  The promise of empty places lacked its familiar allure when I awoke. I resisted the faint call of the plains, drinking at the stream and digging the roots of a water plant for my meal.

  Meanwhile the hare had not returned. Sending tendrils of thought across the nearby hills, I found him beside a female. All across the nearby prairie, hare minds clustered in hollows and beneath brush at odd intervals. I would leave him there. There were plenty to choose from when I needed one.

  Perhaps it was the temporary lack of another mind with mine that set my feet moving. Perhaps it was the way the woman's hands had trembled as they spoke. Without real thought I turned the way I'd come, back to the village. Back to her house.

  When I came to the shack, I stopped for a moment and listened for the bustle and clank that came equally with a busy household or a traveler on the road, but there was no sound. The other dwellings were farther on, far enough that those living there were beyond even my wild-trained ears. Sensing a hare only a short step away, I asked, The woman of this house. Is she near?

  The stream, said the hare, then shrugged my thought away and turned its mind to other things.

  I turned my steps towards the brash growth of riverwoods and water-greedy brush that I guessed to hide a stream bank. I cut across the prairie. Someone as fearful as she would stay well away from the road.

  I slowed as I neared the trees, listening, but my ears caught only the sound of water flowing quick and cool over river-smooth stones. I pushed softly through the brush to the bank and sniffed, wishing for the stronger nose of a hare to help me.

  A string of stones formed a path across the stream. I crossed them and walked a faint trail on the opposite bank, still sniffing, still listening, as though I were tracking a deer rather than a woman. A breath of air swirling past told of a clearing just beyond the bend. I stepped softly to the corner and peered through a thin mask of brush.

  She was there, seated on a thick old tree long fallen, her hands up and about her. All around her, like autumn leaves come to rest, were butterflies. Two or three dropped from the air to land on a finger or a lock of hair, sending others wavering above. Her eyes were closed, and her expression was peaceful.

  She was wild.

  Her silence, her hands speaking for her with a youth my gnarled ones had long lost and a grace mine had never had, the fragile wings hiding in the walls of her shack—they all spoke of it. Her fear when I had seen. As surely as I, she was tied to the wild things, and knew all the fears I knew.

  Something in me must have guessed, long before it came to my thoughts.

  I slunk away again, back down the shaded trail of creekbank clay, across stones and then prairies. I did not allow my step to waver.

  Another one.

  Of course I was not the only one, for working among people I sometimes heard tales of wild ones, of their fierce ways, their kinship to storms and quiet streams and all manner of creatures. That they lived among animals and not among decent folk was proof of their threat, or so the hushed voices said. So had they shouted from the road of my village one autumn afternoon, hurling the word—"Wild!"—after me like a stone at a stray dog. I did not go back.

  Strange that I should find her among people. Never would I have thought to look in a house for a wild one.

  Would she know me? I shrunk from the thought. Would she see in my silence and clumsy motions what I saw in her? In all the years since I was driven out, I had contrived to hide myself in my doings with people. None had ever guessed, not even by my lack of speech, mutes being commoner than wild people.

  Leaving the creek and the house far behind, I walked the swells and dips of the prairies well past dusk, touching the minds of the hares I found and emptying my own of anything but sky and sweet wild grasses.

  * * * *

  For two days I slept with the stars and woke with the dew, digging roots far upstream and listening to thoughts of hares, seeking one that would serve me well. An old female offered herself, bright with her own memories of births. That afternoon I lifted her to my pack, arranged her as comfortably as I could, and walked the morning's journey back to the woman's house, thinking to let the hare know the woman's mind a little before the time came. I walked to the house, darkened and still, and knocked.

  No creak answered, either of floorboard or hinge. I knocked again. Nothing.

  A glance around told me the pony I'd noticed grazing the first night was gone, as well.

  Is she near? I asked the hare on my back. There was a fluttering, anxious pause, as she listened to hares nearby.

  Gone, said the hare, but something in the thought pulled me down the path to the houses nearer the village.

  A wild animal in man's presence knows nothing of his moods or the variations of his passion—its fears are equally dulled by raging silence or sleepy calm. The animals of his household know better, though they may not understand the reason.

  As I sighted the next house hunched against the road, I sensed a watchful stillness about it that hinted fear, though I'd no guess of what, or why I knew—perhaps the shuttered window suggested it. Further on, other houses seemed uneasy. I saw no one bustling in patchwork gardens or traveling along the road. Still the hare's knowing sense pulled me on.

  Finally I came to a house of a bulk that suggested several rooms inside. The window I saw was shuttered and barred. When the front door cracked open, I slipped to the side of the house and dropped to the ground against the cool flatness of the stone.

  “You know he won't,” said a man's strained voice as boots pounded across the worn dirt at the door. “He won't see we can't have her here.”

  “In cold blood,” said another voice, tired. “And a baby.”

  “It'd
be best if she died delivering.”

  “Jess.” Reproachful.

  “At the council tonight...” the voices faded as the men walked away.

  I sat hunched against the stone wall, blood rushing and ears straining. The hare was tense, too, tuned to the voices, but quiet pressure assured me she knew—the woman was within, likely at the other side of this barred window.

  Steps rustled in the grass just around the corner from where I crouched. The sound was enough to send me scrambling to the far corner of the house and around, and then back through a garden and a berry patch fresh in bloom, and finally into the ankle-deep prairie grass where I melted against the hills’ shadows as best I could until the house and road were beyond sight.

  Panting, I settled on a slope and cursed my trembling hands, my skittish legs. What need had I, the midwife, to run?

  But my thoughts ran in speculation far beyond the firm ground of facts. They had taken her, the village people, guessing what I had only recently discovered. Had she walked in the company of butterflies a time too many? Or had they always suspected her silence? The trembling began in my hands again.

  The people of my village had not harmed me, only cast me out, tiring of me finally. Tiring of the hare I always carried with me, of the long times I spent wandering, of the way I shied from touch and smothered in life stuffed and tied in a slant-frame house built of sod and flat stone slabs. The way I hungered for the sky, leaving all the earthrooted behind as I fled across prairie and plain.

  I had not yet learned the deepest ways of hares. I did not know then of their perfect sight into the bodily ways of a woman with child, hinted at by any midwife's token. I had not yet, hare hidden about me, proven my usefulness at a birth. It would take several years of frosts and thunderstorms and hare litters before I finally understood and began to walk my uneasy path, with wild lands at one hand and men's dwellings at the other.

  Sometime since then I had grown accustomed to my role. I no longer listened at every whisper, expecting to be called out, accused. I was only habitually afraid. Until now.