The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  I tried to stay out of everyone’s way, especially Francie’s. I talked with my head averted and asked to do the wash and the dishes so I could sterilize my own things. I picked a fight with Francie and called her a taga-long, so that she avoided me as carefully as I did her. Mother paid no attention to me. She had eyes only for Francie.

  Three weeks after Sombra died, Father said at supper, “The local’s off at Turillos’. Mamita’s over it. The district nurse cleared her this afternoon.”

  “The twins?” Mother said.

  He shook his head. “Both of them died. But none of the hands came down with it. Six months here and not one of them has had so much as a white strip.”

  “It was an unusual strain,” Mother said. “It doesn’t prove anything. They could all die tomorrow.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “The incubation period was very short, as you said. But none of the hands got it.” He put a subtle emphasis on the word ‘none.’

  “Yet,” Mother said. “I’m sure Haven isn’t through coming up with new strains. We’re still without antibiotics.” The fear I had expected was not in her voice.

  “They intercepted the Magassar halfway home and told them we’d had no new cases in a week. They’re holding where they are for a week, and then if there are no other reported, they’ll come back.” He smiled at me. “I’m full of good news today, Haze. The peaches didn’t freeze after all. We’re getting some fruit starting.”

  He turned and looked at Mother, and said in the same cheerful tone, “You’ll have to move the geraniums out of the ponics.”

  Mother put her hand up to her cheek as if he had hit her. “I talked to Mamita,” he said. “She said she’ll buy all the corn we can give her. Cash crop.”

  “Can I move the flowers back to plaindirt?” she asked.

  “No,” Father said. “I’ll need to put the corn wherever I can.”

  She looked at him across the table as if he were her enemy, and he looked just as steadily back. It was as if a bargain had been struck between them, and the price she was paying was her precious flowers. I wondered what price Father had paid.

  “If the peaches aren’t frozen, they could be our cash crop, Father,” I said urgently. “They’ll ripen almost as fast as the corn and you know how hungry everyone will be for real fruit.”

  “No,” Father said. His eyes never left her face. “We need the cash from the corn. To pay for something. Don’t we?”

  “Yes,” she said, and pushed her chair back from the table. “You have your cash crop and I have mine.”

  “I want to put the corn in tomorrow,” he shouted after her. “Pull your geraniums out this afternoon.” Francie was staring at him wide-eyed. “Come on, Haze,” he said more quietly, “I’ll show you the peaches.”

  They did not even look like fruit. But they were there, hard little swellings like pebbles where the tight blossoms had been. “You see,” he said, “we’ll have our cash crop yet.”

  The quarantine sticker was gone from Sombra’s fence. My strip had been white again this morning, and the ache that never quite left me was deeper, into my lungs now.

  “First-generation colonies don’t have cash crops,” Father said. “They’re too busy hanging on, too busy trying to stay alive. They’re abjectly grateful for what the government gives them—greentents, antibiotics, anything. Second-generation aren’t so grateful. The wheat’s doing well and they start noticing that the government’s help isn’t all that helpful. Third-generation colonies aren’t grateful at all. They have cash crops and they can buy what they need from earth, not beg for it. Fourth-generation stop growing wheat altogether and start manufacturing what they need and to hell with earth.”

  “We’re fourth-generation,” I said, not understanding.

  Father had carried down a bucket of lime-sulphur and water and a wad of cloth rags to paint the peaches with. He dipped a rag in the bucket and pulled it out dripping. “No, Haze,” he said. “We’re first-generation, and if the government has its way, we’ll be first-generation forever. The strep keeps us down, keeps us fighting for our lives. We can’t develop light industry. We can’t even keep our children alive long enough to graduate them from high school. We’ve been here nearly seventy years, Haze, and this is our first graduation.”

  “They could drop the antibiotics without landing, couldn’t they?” I said. Little Willie upstairs in the big bed, crying for Mama. “They could wipe it out altogether if they wanted to.” Father was bending over the sulphur-smelling bucket, dipping the rag in the liquid. “Why aren’t you doing something about it?”

  I expected him to say there was nothing they could do, that it was impossible to manufacture antibiotics without filters and centrifuges and reagents, which the government would never ship us. I expected him to say that the only manufactured goods they shipped were those guaranteed not to be vandalized for parts and that the main virtue of the dust-downers as far as the government saw it was that they could not be turned into equipment for making antibiotics. But he wiped industriously at a peach and said, “We will be second-generation yet, Haze,” he said. “We’ll have our cash crops, and the government won’t be able to stop us. They’re shipping us the one thing we need right now, and they don’t even know it.”

  I knelt by the bucket, dipping the worn cloth in the sulphur-smelling liquid.

  “When I first tried to grow peaches, Haze, I used ordinary peach seeds from back home. I started them in the ponics tanks and some of them lived long enough to bloom and I crossed them with others that had survived. Do you remember that, Haze? When the greentent was full of peach trees?”

  I shook my head, still kneeling by the bucket. I could not even imagine it. Now there was no room for anything, not even Mother’s geraniums.

  “I bred for what I thought they needed—a thick skin to stand the sorrel ants and a short trunk to stand the wind, but I couldn’t do any genetic engineering. There isn’t any equipment. I could only cross the ones that did well, the ones that lived long enough to bloom. I knew what I was breeding for, but not what I would get. I never thought it would be so…stunted and turned in upon itself…”

  He was not looking at the tree. He was looking at me. The rag he held was dripping whitish water on the toe of his shoe. “We have people working in emigration, some of them colonists, some of them not, looking at the gene prints and deciding on the emigration permits. We all thought your mother…her genetic prints were almost exactly like Mr. Phelps’, and he’d never had the strep. I’ve only had it twice in all these years. If it was a few points off, still it would be close enough, we thought. You cannot do the same things to people that you do to peach trees. Because it matters when they die.

  “All I have left is this one pale and stunted tree,” he said, and squeezed out the rag on the ground and began painting the fruit again. “And you.”

  The next day we trenched the tree, filling the narrow moat with dried mud and straw to keep the sorrel ants away. Father did not say anything more, and I could not tell anything from his face.

  The day after that I had a negative strip, and I looked at it a long time, thinking about how I was never hot, never cold, how I had never had strep as a child. But Mr. Phelps had died of scarlet fever. Mr. Phelps, who looked like me and never felt the cold. And Mother’s gene prints were almost like Mr. Phelps’.

  I ran down to the tree, almost tripping in the tangle of ripening wheat. Father was standing by the tree, examining one of the peaches. It was no larger that I could see, but it had lost a little of its greenish cast.

  “Do you think we should put a moth net on?” he said. “It’s a little early for moths.”

  “Father,” I said, “I don’t think anything we do will help or hurt it. I think it’s all in the seed.”

  He smiled, and his smile told me what I had been afraid to see before. “So I’ve been told,” he said.

  “I’m immune to the strep, aren’t I?”

  “Her prints were almost exactly thos
e of Mr. Phelps. I had only had the strep twice. We thought it would be close enough, and after you were born, we were sure it would.” He looked through me, as he had done on that day when he saw the sticker on Sombra’s fence. “I have done the best I can for her. I have tried to remember that it was not her fault, that I brought her here to this, that it is my fault for thinking of her as I thought of my peach trees. I have let her turn Francie into a greentent flower that cannot possibly survive. I have let her treat you like a stepchild because I knew you could survive no matter what she did to you. I have let her…” He stopped and passed his hand over his chest. “There is a cache of blackmarket penicillin in the greentent for Francie. It took the cash crop to do it. It will save her once.” He looked away from me toward Turillos’. “I think it’s time to send you to Mamita’s. She’s got all the hands to do for. She’ll need you.”

  He sent me back to the house to pack my things. The day was very hot. Halfway across the field I put my hand up to my forehead, and I could feel the damp sweat curling my hair. It will be cooler under the peach tree, I thought, and started back toward the tree. But halfway there the haze seemed to thicken almost to clouds with a fine pink tint, and the temperature to drop. It will be warmer in the greentent, I thought, shivering. I turned back the way I had come.

  I hit one of the supports in the greentent when I fell. Francie will see that it’s down, I thought, Francie will find me. I tried to pull myself up by the edge of the ponics tanks, but I had cut my hand when I fell and it bled into the tanks.

  Mother found me. Francie had seen the greentent sagging heavily on one side and run to the house to tell her. Mother stood over me for a long time, as if she could not think what to do.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Francie asked from the doorway.

  “Did you touch her?” Mother said.

  “No, Mama.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Mama,” she said, her bright blue eyes full of tears. “Shouldn’t I go get Papa?”

  And at last she knelt beside me and put her cool hand on my hot cheek. “She has the scarlet fever,” she said to Francie. “Go into the house.”

  They put me in the big bed in the front bedroom because of Francie. I tried to keep the covers on, but it was so hot that I kicked them off without meaning to, and then I shivered so that they had to bring more blankets off Francie’s bed.

  “How is she?” Father said.

  “No better,” Mother said. “Her fever still hasn’t broken.” Her voice was less afraid than it had been in the greentent. I wondered if the planetwide had been lifted.

  “I called the district nurse.”

  “Why?” Mother said, still in that quiet voice. “She doesn’t have anything to give her. The Magassar won’t come back again.”

  “There’s the penicillin.” I wondered if they looked as they had looked that day in the greentent, each clutching the frame of the bed as they had held onto the supports of the greentent.

  Mother put her hand to my cheek. It felt cool. “No,” she said quietly.

  “She’ll die without it,” he said. I could hardly hear his voice.

  “There isn’t any penicillin,” Mother said, and her voice was as still as her hand on my cheek. “I gave it to Francie.”

  Something worried at the edge of my mind. I tried to get a hold on it, but my teeth were chattering so badly I could not. The pain in my chest burned like a flame. I thought if I could press with my hand against it, the pain would lessen, but my hand felt muffled, and when I tried to look at it, it was as white as a positive strip.

  Mamita had told me to take a strip when I got home. I did and it was white. But that could not be right, because the incubation period was very short, and I had not gotten sick for nearly a month. But I already had it, I thought. That day Sombra had asked if I was getting sick and there had been that pain behind my sternum that nearly doubled me over by the tree, I had already been getting sick.

  I was edging closer to the worrisome thing, but it was so cold. I never felt the cold. Or the heat. Sombra had leaned forward to me on the wall and said, “Don’t I feel hot?” and the pain had almost doubled me over. She was already getting sick, but so was I. I had been getting sick that day, and I had gotten over it.

  I pulled my hand free of the blankets, and that started me shivering again. The hand was still white and clumsily heavy. I put it over the hollow space between my collarbones and pressed and pressed, my whole body straightening, tautening with the pain until it stretched to nothing.

  Then I got up and put on my graduation dress, fumbling over the buttons with my bandaged hand, a little weak from the fever, but better, better.

  Father was standing by the peach tree, throwing the peaches at the road. They bounced when they hit the hard mud and rolled against Turillos’ fence.

  “Oh, Papa,” I said, “don’t do that.”

  He did not seem to hear me. The dustdowner was kicking up its little trail of dust far down the road. He picked a hard peach off the tree, covered it with his big fist in a grip that should have smashed it, and pitched it at the distant downer.

  “Papa,” I said again. He whirled violently as if he would throw the peach at me. I stepped back in surprise.

  “She killed you,” he said, “to save her precious Francie. She let you die up there crying out her name. Putting her hand on your cheek and tucking you in. She murdered you!” He flung the peach down violently. It rolled to my feet. “Murderer!” He turned to wrench another peach off the tree.

  I put up my hand in protest. “Papa, don’t! Not your cash crop!”

  He dropped his hands and stared limply at the dustdowner rattling down the road toward us. It was pulling a coffin behind it. My coffin. “You were my cash crop,” he said quietly.

  I remembered Mamita’s face when she thought I’d brought the dress for Sombra’s laying out. I looked down at my white shroudlike dress and my hand wrapped in the white bandage. “Oh, Papa,” I said, finally understanding. “I didn’t die. I got better.”

  “She gave the penicillin to Francie,” he said. “While you were still in the greentent. Before she even let Francie come to get me. Your hand was bleeding. She gave her the penicillin before she even bandaged your hand.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I didn’t need the medicine. I got over the scarlet fever by myself.”

  It was finally coming to him, bit by bit, like it had come to me in the big bed. “You were supposed to be immune,” he said. “But you got it anyway. You were supposed to be immune.”

  “I’m not immune, Papa, but I can get over the strep myself. I’ve been doing it all along, all my life.” I picked up the peach at my feet and handed it to him. He looked at it numbly.

  “We were breeding for immunity,” he said.

  “I know, Papa. You knew what you were breeding for, but you didn’t know what you’d get.” I wanted to put my arms around him. “Haven will always be coming up with new strains. It would be impossible to be immune to all of them.”

  He took a knife out of his pocket, slowly, as if he were still asleep. He cut into the peach in his hand, sawing through the thick, dusty skin to the sudden softness underneath. He bit into it, and I watched his face anxiously.

  “Is it all right, Papa?” I said. “Is it sweet?”

  “Sweet beyond hope,” he said, and put his arms around me, holding me close. “Oh, my sweet Haze, we bred to fight the strep, and look, look what we got!”

  He held me by the shoulders and looked down at me. “I want you to go to Mamita’s. You can’t help here. But the hands all have gene prints like yours.” His eyes were full of tears. “You are my cash crop after all.”

  “Now run,” he said and walked away from me, back through the field toward the house. I stood for a minute, watching him, unable to call to him, to shout after him how much I loved them all. I climbed over the fence and stood in the road, looking at the litter of unhurt peaches. The downer was finishing its determined c
ircuit at the top of the hill. If I hurried I could ride my own coffin to Mamita’s and not even get my graduation dress wet. It seemed to me suddenly the most joyous chance in the world—to ride my own coffin, triumphant in my white dress with its fluttering red ribbons.

  I stopped to catch my breath at the top of the hill and looked back at the peach tree. Francie was standing by it, with her hand raised almost in a question. Mama had done her hair in sugar curls for some occasion, and they did not move in the dusty wind that fluttered the red ribbons on my dress. She seemed as still as the brown haze that surrounded her, hugging her thin arms against her chest. I was too far away to see her shivering. Perhaps I would not have known what it meant if I had: I was not bred to read omens.

  “I’ll bring you some penicillin,” I shouted, though she would have no idea of what I was saying. I shouted past her to Papa, who was too far away already to hear me. “I’ll bring you some if I have to walk all the way to the Magassar.”

  “Don’t worry!” I shouted. “They’ll lift the planetwide. I know it.” The dustdowner rattled past me, drowning out my words, and I ran to pull myself up onto the splintery edge of the coffin. “Don’t worry, Francie!” I shouted again, putting my bandaged hand up to my mouth and holding on tight with the other. “We’re all going to live forever!”

  Jack

  The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late. So was the Luftwaffe. The sirens still hadn’t gone by eight o’clock.

  “Perhaps our Violet’s tired of the RAF and begun on the aircraft spotters,” Morris said, “and they’re so taken by her charms, they’ve forgotten to wind the sirens.”

  “You’d best watch out, then,” Swales said, taking off his tin warden’s hat. He’d just come back from patrol. We made room for him at the linoleum-covered table, moving our teacups and the litter of gas masks and pocket torches. Twickenham shuffled his papers into one pile next to his typewriter and went on typing.