by Rinelle Grey
“I’m sorry to hear that, son.” Nerris looked at Tyris thoughtfully for a few moments, then said casually, “Oh well, you probably won’t be stuck here for too long. I’m sure the Colonies will send someone else looking for the anysogen when you don’t return. After all, they know full well it’s here.”
So Yasmyn had told him why he was here. “Actually, I’m not sure they do,” Tyris said. “I mean, obviously someone does, but it’s well hidden.”
“But they sent you after it?” Nerris asked. When Tyris raised an eyebrow, he said, “Come on, I wasn’t born yesterday. I recognise a Space Force ship when I see one.”
“Of course,” Tyris said, wondering what Nerris hoped to gain by this conversation. “But I’m not here on Colonial orders. In fact, I am… was… on leave. I’m here entirely on my own initiative, and no one knows where I am. On top of that, this planet isn’t mentioned in any of the history on anysogen and has been deleted from all the star maps.”
“Deleted from the star maps?” The shock in Nerris’s voice was obvious. “Why would they have done that? No wonder we never saw a rescue ship.”
“I have no idea why it was deleted, obviously something was going on. But even so, they can’t possibly have known there was anyone here to rescue,” Tyris pointed out.
“Do you really believe that?” Nerris said pointedly. “I mean, if there was no one here, why bother to delete the planet from the star maps? Especially one that contained such a valuable resource.”
Tyris struggled to work out what he implied. The villagers had escaped Semala against all odds, how could anyone guess that they had survived? And yet, Nerris had a point. Planets just weren’t removed from the star maps. Before he could even come up with a coherent response, Nerris nodded to him and walked towards the back of the barn.
Marlee came up behind him with her apron full of eggs. “Is everything okay?”
He looked down at her for a moment, then taking her elbow, shepherded her out of the barn. “Marlee, what actually happened on Semala?”
Marlee looked at him as though he had asked a strange question. “What do you mean?”
“When you left. What happened?” Tyris clarified.
“Well, I wasn’t born, so I only know what I’ve overheard,” Marlee explained. “There was a meteor shower. The Colonies said it was harmless, but it wasn’t. A couple of larger meteors made it through the atmosphere. One hit close to the settlement, but didn’t do much damage. That was when the colonial ship left. The other one hit in the middle of the settlement. We left right before it hit.”
Suddenly, Nerris’s assertion that the Colonies must have known people had survived made more sense. “The Colonies would have known people would escape from Semala in the Tenacity. But why didn’t they use it and choose who got in it?” There was so much about this whole scenario that didn’t make any sense.
Marlee shook her head. “The Tenacity didn’t exist when they left. It was a shell, one they used in some sort of testing. It didn’t even have any engines. Nerris rigged up an engine to make it fly somehow, but it wasn’t going to go any real distance.”
Tyris’s eyes widened. “Nerris managed to turn a shell into something that would fly, in what? A couple of weeks?” The man must indeed have been a damn good engineer.
Marlee nodded solemnly. “That’s how it got its name. Everyone said that the only thing that would get them off the planet was Nerris’s tenacity.”
Tyris gave a half smile at her story. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him. “But none of this happened until after the colony ship left, right?” he clarified.
Marlee screwed up her face in thought. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“Why did you expect to be rescued then? The Colonies would have assumed everyone on Semala was killed in the meteor impact. They didn’t know you escaped. They didn’t know there was anyone here to rescue.”
“I guess everyone thought they’d come back for the anysogen. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter though; no one ever came. Except you.” She looked up at him then, giving him a little smile that made his heart jump. The way she said it gave the impression that she thought he was someone special, would do something special. When in reality, he was anything but.
“So there was no other reason for anyone to expect a rescue?” Tyris asked.
Marlee thought for a moment, then said, “Mother and Weiss used to argue about it. Late at night when they thought I was asleep. I was only little, so I don’t really remember much.”
“Let me guess, Weiss thought no one was ever going to rescue you?” Tyris guessed. Weiss didn’t exactly seem like the optimistic type.
“Actually, no, it was the other way around,” Marlee said. “Weiss was sure they were coming back, but Mother told him he was dreaming.” She was silent then, her face closing up, as though the memory wasn’t a pleasant one.
Tyris didn’t push her any further. It was plain she didn’t know much more, but he was intrigued. There was more going on here. And he was determined to get to the bottom of it. Maybe it would distract him from the fact that he could never leave.
TYRIS THOUGHT THAT WITH THE goat milked and the eggs collected there would be little else to do for the day. The snow outside prevented any outdoor activities, and Marlee’s house seemed so bare that he couldn’t imagine anything else that needed to be done inside. But even though she limped a little more heavily by the time they got back to the house, she didn’t stop or sit down.
She collected together bottles, knives, and a sack of sugar then limped towards a wooden crate of apples standing near the door. Tyris jumped up. “Here, let me get that.”
Marlee threw him a grateful look and settled herself on the stool at the table. Tyris put the crate in front of her, and she pulled an apple out and cut the peel off it with the knife. Tyris pulled the other stool out opposite her. “What are you doing?”
“Preserving these apples so they won’t go bad. That way we can eat them over winter.” She cut the apples into slices as she talked, dropping them into a bowl of water in the middle of the table.
“Why are you putting them in water?”
“To stop them going brown.”
“Do you have another knife?”
Marlee pointed to the drawer, and after fetching the knife, Tyris tried to copy her. Instead of peeling off a thin layer of skin, he took half the apple with it, and his final apple pieces were nowhere near as neat as Marlee’s.
This life was so much harder than he had expected. He put the knife down. “I think your goat could do a better job of chopping these apples,” he joked. “I’d better stop, or you’ll end up with no apples to eat over winter.”
Marlee smiled across at him. “It doesn’t matter what they look like. They’ll taste the same no matter how they’re cut. You’ll get better the more you do,” she encouraged.
That was true, so Tyris picked up the knife again and continued to cut. They worked steadily for a while, until Marlee deemed they had enough apples for the first batch. She reached for the glass jars and filled them neatly with apple slices.
“Why are we putting them in bottles?” Tyris asked, copying her.
“Because they’ll be sealed off from bacteria, meaning they’ll last longer.”
“How do we seal them?” Tyris asked. “Don’t you need sort of machine for that?”
Marlee laughed. “No, no big machines necessary. We boil them in hot water, and as it heats, the water expands. When it cools again, it shrinks, creating a vacuum, and sealing the lid on tightly.”
Tyris’s eyes widened. Her simple explanation of physics rules he had not thought of since school surprised him. It shouldn’t have. The village seemed to be populated by people who had been highly qualified before the disaster, but it still seemed at such odds with the primitive surroundings. “How did you learn all this?”
Marlee shrugged. “Mother, Nerris, and the other’s had some warning about the meteor that hit Semala, they printed off a lot of informati
on on survival skills before they left. And I guess they must have known some of this stuff anyway. Even before we were cut off, ships from the Colonies were infrequent. People on Semala needed these skills to survive.”
“So I suppose you brought all this equipment with you too?” Tyris waved to include the jars sitting on the bench, and the plastic lids and rubber rings sitting in a bowl of water.
Marlee nodded, as she filled each jar with a mixture of dark, lumpy sugar and water that had been boiling on the stove, then put a rubber ring and lid on each, clipping them on tightly. “We’re running short on a lot of supplies by now of course. These rubber rings are specially made, and are good for twenty years, probably for a few more, but some are starting to fail now. After the bottles cool, we’ll need to check that they’ve all sealed properly. If any haven’t, we’ll throw those rings away, and eat the food in the next week.” She arranged the bottles carefully in a large pot and added water until they were all covered.
“What will you do when you have no more rings left?” Tyris asked. She sounded so matter of fact about it, but to him, it sounded like a disaster. He hadn’t even thought about where the villagers kept food to last the winter. He was used to vacuum sealed packages, refrigerators, and food being shipped from all over the galaxy.
“We have other ways to store food,” Marlee said calmly. “We dry a lot of food during summer, while it’s still hot. And we store a lot buried in the ice, where it stays frozen. Can you hang the pot over the fire, on that hook?” She pointed.
Tyris did as he’d been asked, feeling a little reassured. He was as dependent on their food storage methods as they were and was far less knowledgeable. “What do you do with them once they’re done?”
Marlee limped over to a curtain on the wall and pulled it aside. On the shelves behind it were an impressive number of bottles in several different colours. “We keep them here, and we can have fruit over the winter, when nothing will grow.”
“Yes, but what do you do with them? Just eat them out of the jar?”
“Sometimes, but usually you make an apple pie or apple crumble, or use them as toppings for cakes and biscuits,” Marlee explained. “Where do you get apples for apple pie?”
“Um, I don’t think I’ve ever had apple pie,” Tyris admitted, “although I have seen some in the frozen aisle in the supermarket.”
Marlee wrinkled up her nose. “They sell frozen apples at the supermarket?”
“Not frozen apples, frozen apple pies,” Tyris corrected.
“You mean you can just go along and get a pie that someone else has made?”
“Well, yes. You put it in your trolley, pay for it on your way out, and heat it up at home. Easy as pie.” He laughed at his own pun.
“Amazing,” Marlee shook her head, as though she couldn’t quite believe it.
It was amazing, Tyris realised. He had always taken it for granted, the ability to buy food already prepared or to order something if he was in a rush. In fact, he didn’t even really give food much thought. It had never occurred to him to stop and be grateful for its existence. It was just there.
“Do you want to help me get the next batch ready?”
Tyris nodded, and they spent a few hours bottling the apples. Then they sat quietly by the fire. Marlee asked him to read to her and handed him an obviously prized, tattered old book. It was a story he had read in childhood, tales of adventure and excitement, something he would have dismissed as childish had he been home. But somehow, as he read it to Marlee, watching her eyes light up with enjoyment, it was anything but boring.
While he read, Marlee picked up two thin wooden sticks with wool wound around them, and began moving them together rapidly.
After he finished reading the story, he watched her, spellbound by the confidence with which she moved. Her knitting was almost hypnotic to watch. “Don’t you ever just sit and do nothing?” he asked curiously.
She looked up at him in surprise and her hands kept moving as she answered, almost as if they were working under their own violation. “Rarely. There is so much to do, especially coming up to winter. Idleness is a luxury we just can’t afford.”
Tyris thought back on his life, replete with idleness, and felt a touch of guilt. “What are you making?” he asked to cover up the uncomfortable feeling. The thick wool made a knobbly fabric in what appeared to be a square shape.
“Slippers.”
For a moment, he wondered what she meant. Then his grandmother came to his rescue again, with an image of the horrid pink, fluffy shoes she wore only inside the house. Glancing down at Marlee’s feet, he saw she wore soft flexible shoes, their knobbly texture exactly like the item she knitted, and he understood.
“You’ll need them if you’re going to be here for the winter,” she continued. “They were supposed to be Nelor’s, but he’s…” She broke off suddenly as she glanced up at him.
In all his life, no one had ever made him anything before. Not with their own two hands. Sure, he’d received lots of presents, but none with this much effort put into them. He felt strangely touched... Until he realised they had originally been for Nelor. He was only getting them by default. Still, the feeling lingered, not entirely unpleasant. Marlee looked back to her knitting, so he opened the book and began to read the next story.
Once all the bottles were sitting on the kitchen table to cool and Marlee had put all of the apple peel and cores into a bucket to feed to the animals, it seemed that the day’s work was done. Or almost done.
“While we’re thinking of it, we should pull out that pallet and make it up,” Tyris suggested.
But for some reason, Marlee hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” she said.
“Why not?” Despite her earlier comments to the contrary, maybe she did have plans to try to convince him to give her a baby.
“If anyone comes to visit and sees the pallet set up, they’re not going to believe that we’re really involved,” Marlee explained.
Tyris hesitated. She did have a point. The pallet on the floor would be a dead giveaway that they weren’t sleeping together. But was it really a good idea to share a bed with her? Especially considering the effect she was having on him.
Was it only a month ago that he’d left home and come all this way with the hope of winning Milandra back? Even though he had to accept that he would never see his wife again, it still wouldn’t be right to move on so quickly, as though Milandra had never existed.
“We could put it away each morning?” he suggested.
“What if someone arrives early, before we’ve had a chance to, or if there was an emergency in the middle of the night?”
Tyris bit back a sigh. Was it really likely that anyone would find them out from such a small thing? The risk seemed minimal. And yet, if their ruse was discovered, it would be uncomfortable for both of them. And he had no idea how severe the repercussions would be for Marlee if they knew she’d deceived them deliberately. He’d agreed to this pretence, and he owed it to her to make sure no one found them out. Apparently sharing a bed was part of that.
“I think we’re both adult enough to not read more into the situation than there is,” Marlee encouraged. “Besides, it can get quite cold in the early hours of the morning when the fire has died down, and I really don’t have enough blankets for two beds.”
Somehow, that explanation made Tyris feel a little more comfortable about nodding in agreement. He’d never been one to be a martyr, and spending his nights shivering for a principle seemed a little stupid. He could keep things platonic. It would be no different to when he and his brother had shared a bed on holidays as kids.
DESPITE THE EXTRA COAT SHE’D worn, Marlee gave a shiver as she stepped outside. After nearly a week of being stuck at home because of her ankle, she didn’t care that it was freezing. She was just glad to be going out. Beside her, Tyris hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands into his coat pockets.
Light from the windows of the town hall shone throu
gh the grey mist, and a burst of laughter from inside reached them. Marlee picked up her pace, looking forward to seeing her friends.
She was nearly at the door when her foot slipped on a sheet of ice under the snow. Her arms waved in the air, and she struggled to find a foothold on the ice. She was just imagining how hard the ground was going to feel when she hit it when Tyris grabbed her elbow and steadied her.
“You okay?”
Marlee took a deep breath then let it out. “Yes, just a bit slippery. Thanks. I’m fine now.” She tested her ankle carefully, but there was no pain.
Tyris nodded, but didn’t let go. He slid his hand down her arm and closed it around hers. His fingers felt warm despite the cold air, his grip strong and sure.
Perfect. Walking into the hall hand in hand would definitely help their charade.
Her cold face tingled as she stepped inside. Several people stared at them. Or rather, at their hands. Most of the looks were friendly, but a couple of glances from the women were more calculating. Marlee stepped closer to Tyris and made sure everyone could see their clasped hands.
Tyris didn’t seem to notice the stares. “Wow, I had no idea it would be this busy.” He let go of her hand, and Marlee felt a stab of disappointment. She shot a glare at the few women who had looked at him earlier just to make sure they didn’t get any ideas.
“It’s usually pretty busy here,” Marlee said. “The short days and cold temperatures of winter can be depressing. Gathering together helps keep everyone’s spirits up.”
Right inside the door, two large lemon trees in pots took up centre stage. In summer, they would be wheeled outside for the sun, but the deep snow outside now would kill them. Other plants sat in pots along the window ledges on the south facing wall. Strawberries, lettuce, broccoli, cucumbers, herbs, and even tomatoes and zucchini grew surprisingly well, with the sun coming through the windows in between storms.