Sue nodded, resenting the patronizing attitude Bruce had adopted. Did he think that she was thick or something?
“So we plant a few seeds in here today. A lot of them should really be planted as seedlings transplanted from boxes; we’ll worry about that later. Okay?”
“So far.” Boxes. Now what’s he talking about? Sue wondered, quickly becoming confused.
“In a week or so we’ll plant a few more, maybe as seedlings. That’ll hopefully give us a continual supply of veggies once we start picking them.” He took another drag on his cigarette, coughed as he inhaled some smoke down the wrong tube and looked at Sue for confirmation that she understood.
“I’m with you so far,” she lied, still trying to work out how the vegetables would grow in boxes set in the ground. She vaguely recalled seeing something on the TV once about growing pumpkins or something in boxes so that they came out all nice and square. Was that what he was on about?
“We’ll use these to mark out the drills.” Bruce clamped his smoke firmly between his lips and picked up one of the sticks he had cut and pushed it into the ground.
“What’s a drill?”
“Chuck me a packet of seeds. Any one will do!” he snapped impatiently, as Sue deliberated about which to give him. “Hurry up!”
“There’s no need to shout at me, Bruce. I can hear you,” she snapped back, tossing a packet of seeds at him.
“Thanks.” He tore open the packet and tipped some of the contents into his hand.
“We plant these in a shallow groove in the soil, which we make with the edge of this thing,” he said, deciding he would have made an excellent instructor.
Sue picked up the hoe, eyed it dubiously and then dragged it along with the blade horizontal to the ground.
Well, then again, maybe not. “Oh, give it here,” he said, grabbing the hoe and flipping it around with one hand and making a groove with the edge of the blade. “You make me tired just watching you.”
Sue watched as Bruce extended the groove to about two meters in length then tossed the hoe aside and began to trickle seeds into the groove between his fingers. “Then we cover the drill when we’ve finished, like this, and tamp it down. So. Got it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Let’s get cracking then.”
Once the packets were empty and staked on a marker peg to identify what was in each row, Bruce dug a shallow trench into which he dropped the seed potatoes, one by one. He was just finishing when Leaf arrived on the scene.
Twenty-three
“What can they be doing?” With mounting confusion Leaf had observed the offworlders’ activities from the safety of the house all morning. First Bruce had ridden around on a vehicle the like of which she had never seen, turning the ground upside down. Then with a rod with some odd attachment on the end he had made lines in the ground and had appeared to drop something in them.
It interested Leaf that Sue appeared totally ignorant about whatever Bruce was trying to do, as he was continually stopping to show her what he wanted from her.
“Why did they make the lines on the ground and then erase them?” Leaf thought it would have been easier not to turn the ground over in the first place.
Eventually, overcome by her curiosity, Leaf decided to brave the journey from the accommodation quarters down to where the offworlders had turned the ground over.
Leaf began her journey, half expecting never to cover the distance. This short trip of a mere few hundred meters was further than Leaf, or any Skidian she had ever heard of for that matter, had traveled on foot across the wilderness in generations. That the offworlders obviously were not concerned about the situation gave her the confidence to continue when she was ready to scamper back to the sanctuary of the accommodation quarters.
As she got closer to the offworlders, Leaf realized no terrible monster was going to leap out and grab her. However, this did not stop her covering the last fifty metres at a trot to gain the relative safety of the offworlders’ company.
“What are you doing?” Leaf asked after taking a few moments to recover her composure.
Bruce launched into a rambling and confusing explanation of his efforts of the past few hours which she did not begin to understand, especially since Bruce concluded by saying that he was making organic food. Leaf knew that was unlikely. Whatever Bruce was up to, it was not producing organic food.
“You’ll see!” Bruce laughed rudely.
Leaf ignored him and inspected the contents of one of the bags that had been tipped onto the ground, fingering the tiny balls inside. How could this ever become food? Even Sue was obviously dubious about that. Bruce stood up, rubbed his hands together, brushed off some of the dirt that clung to his skin and glanced around, apparently satisfied with his endeavors.
How could they let themselves become so filthy? Leaf wondered as Bruce rolled himself a cigarette. Leaf knew he did not follow the Skidian custom of sharing agar. This was a pity, for she figured that using agar herself might at least give her a chance to collect her thoughts. She became even more confused when he told Sue to get something from the storage structure.
Sue wandered off with as much grace as she could muster, delivering a sharp comment to Bruce as she walked away. Leaf did not catch what she said, but was sure that if she had rebuked a Skidian male in such a manner, she would be hustled off quickly to be socially rehabilitated.
Sue returned several minutes later with three oddly assorted objects: a large container like the one at the male’s feet, a slim, finger-length object with a sharp point at one end and another that defied description. This object consisted of a short handle, the length and width of her forearm. Attached to one end of the handle was a two-headed fitting. One of the heads was shaped like a ball cut in half, the other like two flattened, curled fingers, bent backwards towards the handle.
Bruce upended the large container at his feet, held his hand out for the other two objects and then used them to make holes in the container, hitting the slim piece of steel with the double-headed handle.
Leaf was perplexed, for he was destroying the utility of the container. It would never hold fluids again! Even more confusing was that this destructive behavior did not seem to be another example of his primitive instincts getting the better of him. Rather, his actions seemed to be premeditated, for he took great care in arranging the holes in a neat circular pattern.
“Here!” he said, thrusting the other container at her. “Take this down to the river.”
Leaf was perplexed, for he seemed to be pointing to the moving water.
“And fill it up.”
Her bewilderment was total. Did he mean to wash in it? Why the water from the river when the water in the accommodation quarters was specially piped in from the synthoplant?
Doubtfully she took the container and walked down to the river, too confused to be afraid. After some experimentation she managed to fill the bucket by submerging it, hoping this was what Bruce wanted. She looked down at the bucket and almost dropped it when she saw that some hidden force had suddenly distorted its shape. Leaf almost let the bucket go a second time as something else hiding in the water tried to tug it out of her grasp. She jumped backwards, pulling the bucket out of the water, spilling half of it in the process. She stared at the bucket expecting to find some live thing in it preparing to devour her. However, as far as she could tell it contained only water.
She trudged back to where the offworlders stood watching her, wondering how she should report the events of the morning to Sideshow when the truth would simply get her into trouble. Sideshow would never believe her observations and would surely punish her for reporting them, dismissing them as wild fantasies.
Bruce took the bucket from her and peered inside at the water, dipping one of his fingers into the liquid and then sucking the finger to see how it tasted. Leaf watched him intently, expecting him to fall down dead at any moment, horrified that he could be so casual in handling such a dangerous substance.
> Bruce tipped about half the water into the container with the perforated base and then walked along one of the freshly sown rows. Why would Bruce want to wash the ground? Leaf wondered, and how would that help the buried particles grow into plants? An alternative food production system indeed! Primitives might have such systems and eat all sorts of disgusting material, but the Skidians could not. And would not!
“What I want you to do, Leaf, is to water these rows of seeds exactly like I have shown you, once a day,” Bruce instructed as he handed her the jury-rigged sprinkler. Leaf thought about disobeying this pointless instruction, but a part of her was intrigued, despite her skepticism. There was always an outside chance the offworlders had something useful to show them, however improbable that might seem at the moment.
Leaf trudged along, carefully washing the ground with water as instructed, while the offworlders collected their equipment. Incensed and increasingly bitter about being treated like a drone, she quite forgot to concern herself about the moving water when she went to refill her container. She dunked it into the water, half hoping but still fearing that whatever was in there might devour her and relieve her of the shame of her new existence.
Suddenly the two offworlders sprinted towards the moving water, shedding their clothing as they ran, leaping into the water as if escaping something so terrible that it threatened certain death. Leaf had never seen such a sight; some unknown terror must have deranged them, she thought. Or perhaps it was just stress; maybe their minds had snapped like a brittle bone.
Sideshow had warned her of the danger signals: using too much agar, drinking too much alcohol, generally erratic behavior. But what was erratic for the offworlders? What was odd by Skidian standards might be conventional behavior for them.
Leaf watched them thrashing around in the water. She had seen archival footage showing subversives being thrown to the creatures that lived in the great salty waters and decided that some of their relatives must live here in the moving water.
Leaf swayed, started to feel light-headed and almost collapsed as she realized the offworlders were lost and that she had only just escaped their fate herself.
The thrashing and squeals that Leaf had associated with terrible death throes ceased, replaced moments later by the sound of laughter, though it took Leaf a moment to recognize what it was, for she had rarely heard the sound of people laughing. She was surprised by the sense of relief she felt as she realized that the offworlders were not in trouble after all.
They were probably still doomed, if they were not already suffering from a mental breakdown, they must now certainly succumb to one of the many pathogens surely present in the moving water.
Bruce stopped trying to drown Sue for a moment, when he saw Leaf watching them from the riverbank. “I wonder if the Skidians like swimming, Sue?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“Hey, Leaf!” he called. “Why don’t you jump in?”
Leaf did nothing to suggest she had heard him. Instead, tossing her head haughtily, she walked off towards the house wondering how she was going to explain the imminent demise of the offworlders to Sideshow.
“Typical!” Bruce grunted. “She hasn’t even finished yet.”
Leaf watched the offworlders closely from her quarters. After some time they left the moving water, apparently unaffected by their experience. In the meantime she had contacted Sideshow to inform her of the offworlders’ peculiar conduct and felt a little resentful at the cryptic reply she received. ‘Immersion in water is a normal activity for the offworlders!’ Well, Leaf pouted, if they had told me this previously, it would have saved a lot of unnecessary anxiety on my part!
Twenty-four
Over the days that followed, Leaf continued to wash the ground as she had been instructed, noting none of the changes the offworlder insisted would occur.
Meanwhile Bruce occupied himself by fencing off the garden and then turned his attention to planning his model farm, deciding the first thing he required was some stock yards so he could work with the ivops.
This brought its own logistical problems. Offhand he couldn’t remember the correct dimensions of some of the integral parts of a set of yards, the races for instance. Besides, the ivops were generally a bit smaller than the average cattle beast. The relevant data was stored somewhere in his head, a most unreliable of repositories. Useless to him because he was unable to extract it.
His tablet, however, was in some ways more in tune with Bruce’s thoughts than he was himself, and the information was soon forthcoming, and a pile of material suddenly appeared on the ground where he’d marked out the dimensions for the yards.
Bruce reveled in the demanding physical exertion required to dig the large postholes, the technical skill required to swing the gates and put the rails up just so. Well initially, anyway.
While there were numerous holes to dig, it never occurred to Bruce to get the yards built, as if by magic, in the same fashion that the house had been. So as he toiled, he became increasingly resentful at the attitude of the Skidians because no assistance was forthcoming from them. Not that he would have accepted any assistance in his present mood, even if it were offered.
He stuck to his task until the last post was rammed firm, the last gate swung and the last rail fastened home, for the satisfaction of sitting back and announcing that he’d created his very own monument. A kind of rural art form. A practical art form that was essential to his plans to make the Skidians realize he was indispensable to them.
Sue had attempted to help early on but gave up when she discovered what brutally hard work it was. It did not help that Bruce seemed to be more touchy than usual and snapped at her when she got in the way or did something wrong.
“I’m sorry, Bruce,” she said, having found that digging a five-foot deep post hole was a bit beyond her. This begged the question, though, she couldn’t ask. Why Bruce was so intent on doing the work manually, for certainly it was not necessary. It seemed to her, correctly as it happened, that he was trying to prove something to the Skidians, to the extent of making his own life and that of the others around him miserable.
Then as if he were the celestial creator Bruce rested, rested for so long that Leaf approved because it showed he was becoming attuned to the laid back, casual Skidian approach to life. Bruce would not have appreciated this unflattering comparison. During these restful days he planned the size and form of his model farm, not that this was crucial, given his the vastness of the resources available to him.
From Sue’s perspective he did little more than sit around the house, making incomprehensible notes on numerous pieces of paper that he screwed up and dropped on the floor. He drank steadily and devoured the food she supplied in a misplaced effort to keep him sober. Bruce’s behavior perplexed her, for he suddenly seemed to have distanced himself from her. It did not occur to her that he might simply be busy.
Sue spent many worried hours trying to analyze her own behavior and find a reason for his apparent withdrawal. While she whipped herself into a frenzy of self-doubt, Bruce was reaching the conclusion that life would be a lot happier if he worked on the premise that everything he did should be for his own benefit. This brightened his outlook considerably. However, he soon found that thinking positively was one thing, maintaining such an attitude in an environment where all the signals were negative was quite another.
Several mornings after the yards were complete Leaf returned from washing the ground and informed Sue casually that something strange was happening in the garden.
“This is fantastic!” Sue exclaimed as she kneeled to examine some of the bright green shoots that had forced their way out of the soil in uneven rows. “These are plants. They’re growing, Leaf!” She tugged at Leaf’s arm and pointed them out.
Leaf nodded vaguely, wondering what Sue was so excited about. ‘So what?’
Sue dashed up the hill to the house and shook Bruce awake.
“What is it?” he asked, feigning sleepiness, nursing a
low-level hangover, as Sue told him about some of the vegetable seeds germinating.
“So what? I knew they would,” Bruce grunted, feigning disinterest.
“Come and have a look,” she insisted.
“Why on earth would I want to do that?” Bruce tugged the bed cover over his head and tried to hide. Sue pulled it away. “Oh, all right! I’m coming!” he growled and ambled down to the garden.
“These seeds have a remarkably good germination rate, considering they’ve been in packets for several thousand years,” he commented, having nothing more to say. After a few moments he grunted then walked off to check out another pile of equipment that had arrived overnight.
Amongst the additional plastic fence posts and other miscellaneous items, a multicolored box caught his eye. He picked up the box, held it to his ear and shook it listening for rattles, turning it over in his hands, searching for some clue as to its possible use. On the base of the box he found the operating instructions that revealed it to be an electric fence energizer. All he needed to do was hook it up to a fence. It must be a solar-powered job, he reckoned, because apparently no power input was required. Bang a couple of steel poles into the ground for an earth, run a wire from the unit to a fence and, hey presto, it ought to work.
He decided to test the equipment by electrifying the fence around the garden. Bruce knew he’d never hear the end of it if a mob of ivops blundered into the garden and he hadn’t done anything to stop them.
He found a hammer Sue had dropped carelessly on the ground days before in front of the shed. Then he found a nail and hammered it into the wall beside the main doors on which he hung the power pack.
While he busied himself setting up the electric fence, Leaf was absorbed with washing the ground where the seedlings were haphazardly poking through the soil. She let her attention wander occasionally as she observed Bruce’s peculiar behavior, wondering what he was up to this time. As usual, there did not seem to be any discernible logic to his actions.
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