No, it wasn’t.
“You’ve kept the key muscles weak. At this point they’re probably quite spindly.”
Her head throbbed. She stared at the top of the desk.
“Keep at it.”
She tried again, but there was no vertigo and no sensation of hot worms coiling anywhere near her eyes. She pulled out a chair and plunked down. “I imagined the whole thing.”
“Myrta!” For a moment Ephraim looked as though he might launch into another anatomy lesson, but then he stopped and said, “I diagnosed you myself, when you were born. You have the trait.”
He came over, stood behind her chair, and placed his fingers along the sides of her face. “Do you feel anything if you clench your jaw and move the sensation of pressure upward?”
Sensation of pressure. Great. She tried and shook her head.
Ephraim exhaled forcefully through his nose right onto the top of her head. “I don’t feel the extra musculature either, but it’s a bad diagnostic to begin with.” He paced back to the window, facing out, hands in his pockets, shoulders back. Looking irritated.
The lengths her family had gone to, leaving her on the farm for seventeen years. She pushed away from the table. “Can I be excused?”
He said out the window, “No. Getting you up to speed is not straightforward. There are levels to stimulating your tissue development, first turning the infernal thing on. You’ll need to practice each stage before advancing to the next. We’re already behind schedule—” He turned to her. His expression faltered. She knew why. When she felt the way she did now, all failure and frustration, she looked like a tusked moarab. That’s what Jack said, anyway, that she turned into fury and spikes. She definitely felt like a moarab, ready to gore something.
“All right,” Ephraim said. “Yes.”
Myrta left, went to the kitchen, grabbed a plum from the bowl, and tore into it. Ardelle was tightening lids on another batch of plum jam. Pits and peels spilled out of the garbage pail. “How was it?” Ardelle asked this every time.
“Nothing. It was nothing. There was nothing.”
From the office came the sound of a desk drawer slamming. Ardelle stopped mid-twist and looked down the hallway. Then came the sound of glass on glass. Ardelle pinched her lips and looked straight at Myrta. “Sweetheart. We need a break. And I’m dying to see you smile. Just once I want to see a smile on that beautiful face of yours.”
“It’s ridiculous. I sit there, and he says to think about tension. It doesn’t mean anything.” Myrta scrunched her face around her eyes again.
Ardelle smiled. “You’re right, I don’t think that’s going to do it.” She shoved the jars to the back of the counter. “Let’s go shopping.”
“All right. I don’t care.”
They left and walked the few blocks over to the thoroughfare, and Ardelle opened the door to a women’s dress shop.
Myrta pulled up short. Racks of clothing crowded the little store. Sturdy dresses, gauzy ones. She drew her fingers down the sleeve of a blouse; the fabric rippled, light as a baby chick. She whispered, “Celeste always made our clothes.”
Ardelle pulled a green and yellow sundress from the rack and held it up to Myrta. “Well. You can buy them too, sweetheart.”
* * *
That evening, Myrta sank into the office chair as she had done every morning and evening now. Ephraim was rifling through receipts on the desk. “I have a few ideas.”
She barely heard him. His shoulders had gone all slumped, like the mashed potatoes at supper. She’d go back to the kitchen later for leftovers.
“I could examine your eyes while you’re trying. I could look for the tissue changes around the orbit or within the lenses. The inferior rectal muscles relax before the medial musculature tightens. I might see that, or the ciliaries, if we’re lucky.”
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. Would it help?”
He was fiddling with the pencils, like he thought they’d be sharper if he stared at them one by one. “It wouldn’t hurt.” He looked at the cabinet on the wall above the desk, and his shoulders fell further. “No.”
There’d been gravy with the potatoes. Maybe there was leftover gravy.
His voice fell. “Or we could expose you to gaseous carbon. The exhaust from Mel’s aut,” he examined one of his fingernails and mumbled, “may have triggered an instinctive response.”
She wasn’t listening anymore. Odile had overcooked the green beans, but the caramelized onions made up for that. If she mixed the onions with the gravy, if there was any gravy, and put some potatoes on top . . . “Wait. What?”
He rubbed his thumbnail, not meeting her eyes. “I could expose you to gaseous carbon.”
“Like the exhaust?”
His face creased in pain. “It would hurt.”
“But it could work.” It would work. It was the first useful thing he’d said. They could’ve tried it weeks ago.
“Children normally mature into this painlessly. Using gas would force it.”
He stood there, so shrunken. But what he said made sense. Gaseous carbon explained everything—why she’d had a spell at Reuben’s irrigation, and another behind the aut. She found herself standing. “I don’t care.”
He glanced at the cabinet over the desk.
“Uncle Ephraim.”
He squinted.
“Sitting around is pointless. Nothing’s worked, and Aunt Ardelle keeps saying how unsafe I am.”
“If we get you up to speed before the Caravan wagons roll in, you’ll have nothing to worry about.” Ephraim looked at the cabinet again, muttering, “We could have worked on this years ago, but telling Terrence about you was out of the question.”
“Years ago?”
All the lectures from Terrence, the daily chores, Nathan’s endless torment, always feeling out of place—she could have been spared that years ago? “What, would you have just switched us back?”
His voice rose. “We never wanted to ‘switch’ you in the first place. We love you. I know it doesn’t feel that way but try to understand—your safety had to come first.” He faced down, looking shamed, and added softly, “I suppose, yes, we would have switched you back.”
It was so entirely and utterly callous. She was no more than a thing to these people, but then, with a chill, with the idea of losing someone she loved, perhaps a child, she saw the possibility of making the same choices they had.
“Myrta, try something for me. Some of the muscles are behind your temples. Just, just think about the back of your temples, and push forward there with your fingers.”
She did; nothing happened. “I want the gas.”
“I know. We’ll try a little—”
She planted her hands on the table. “Uncle Ephraim, we’ve been trying for weeks. I want gas.”
“And I don’t want to hurt you. Again. When I sprayed you as a baby you cried for over an hour.”
“Why does that even matter? You left me on a farm. And I’ve been thinking about ‘ideas of sensations of pressure’ forever.”
Ephraim leaned forward, his eyes sharp. “We will try a bit longer. If we fail, we’ll consider the gas.”
This was unreal. First market was over a month ago, and if he would simply agree, they could get on with it. But he refused to back down, and so Myrta endured another hour of failure and arguments. Ephraim said she wasn’t trying, she accused him of hiding behind medical words. He said she should at least try to understand how her body was put together, and she said that wasn’t the problem.
In the end, he yanked a case out of the cabinet and slammed it onto the table. “To be clear, this will not give you any control.”
He pulled a handheld scope from the case, and his face blanched. Pursing his lips, he inserted a small canister into the handle. He sat across from her. “Whenever you’r
e ready.”
“I’m definitely ready.”
“Keep your eyes open. This will certainly hurt.” Pointing the scope toward Myrta’s eyes, he pushed something on the back, and a “poof” of air shot at her.
Tugging tore at the sides of her face. She slapped her hands to her temples. The world started spinning.
“Don’t fight it,” Ephraim shouted above her cries.
She wanted to hurl.
“Make the muscles contract,” he shouted.
Muscles? Her dinner was coming up.
Ardelle rushed in. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”
“Ardelle, let her be.”
The chair tilted sideways. She was on the ground groaning.
Ardelle ran over and squatted next to her. “Ephraim, what have you done?”
Myrta twisted away. The tugging had a will of its own, something insisting this happen, this contortion through her temples, around and behind her eyes, all on its own, more strongly than she’d felt before, deep and primal like a beast waking. “Make it stop!”
Ardelle cried, “Did you hurt her? Is that your scope?”
“Not now.”
The urge to do the old exercises drove through Myrta like a spike, years of Celeste demanding that she relax. She rolled back and forth on the floor, slamming against the chairs and shelving.
Books fell down. Ardelle was yelling. Ephraim was yelling. Years of practice pitched battle against this strange biology gripping her. Waves tore through her skull. She needed to wrench her thoughts away from relaxing. She needed a distraction.
“Keep fighting,” she cried.
Ardelle exclaimed, “Ephraim, what have you done? She wants us to fight.”
“Then we fight!”
“Are you out of your mind? You want to fight because a sick child is asking you to?”
He shouted, “Because our sick child is asking us to.”
Somehow, through the ensuing screaming match, Myrta focused on a task opposite her lifelong practice. And a few minutes later, the curious pressure washed over her again, through her eyes, through her temples, relieving the vertigo. Between one instant and the next, the world steadied. The floor was solid. She lay still, with her eyes closed. “You can stop.”
Ardelle was in the middle of a rude observation about Ephraim’s bathroom habits.
Myrta repeated, “I said stop.”
Ephraim was beside her now. “Can I look?”
That pressure, that feeling . . . it was the same as before. She cracked one eye.
Rainbows filtered into view. Reds, greens, faint streaks of yellow like the trails of shooting stars. Silver flecks drifted in the air.
Both eyes flew open. Cobalt blue hung like clouds around her parents’ faces and in front of her own, swirling in and out with their breath. Color surrounded her. Everywhere. Everywhere there was color mixing, settling.
“It’s the same,” she whispered. Only this time, they said it was normal. The chemistry of the air, Uncle Ephraim had said.
It was beautiful.
Smiling gently, Ephraim examined one of her eyes and then the other. “Now, Myrta. Now do you believe me? You were not imagining things.”
* * *
The next morning the bedroom was bright. Outside, the handyman was harnessing Rennet and Rusty.
Myrta pulled on a dress and found Celeste and Ardelle in the kitchen.
As she came in, Ardelle said, “Good morning, dear. After the excitement last night, we thought you should sleep as long as you wanted.”
Celeste’s lips were pressed together. She fussed with a basket of plums, arranging and rearranging them. She seemed to be putting them in parallel rows, but they kept jumbling back together. Without meeting Myrta’s eyes, she said, “I’m going back to the stead. You’ll stay here.”
“What? No. How will I get home?”
Celeste swallowed. Her chest rose and fell, and she covered the plums with a corner of the little towel. “Myrta. You are home.” She blinked a few times, then set the basket on the counter and put her arms out. Myrta ran into them.
“Oh, Myrta,” Celeste whispered into the hug, “the stead is also your home. Always.”
Ardelle said softly, “Sweetheart, you can live in the belt just as soon as your trait is developed.”
The ground seemed to move. This wasn’t right. “I—”
Celeste pulled away and picked up the basket again, wrapping both arms around it and holding it hard against herself. “Terrence is shorthanded. I miss the boys.”
“But Mama . . .”
Celeste blinked. Tears fell to her cheeks. “Oh, dear daughter of mine, you’ll be all right. You will. And we’ll see you at Caravan.”
Chapter Eighteen
Buried in swampy soil amid fallen trees.
Buried in deep ocean sediments amid phytoplankton.
Which of these, or both, Alphonse was never sure, only that he and those like him, cold and dead, were lost into oblivion.
Days turned to years, to centuries, to epochs. Alphonse awoke gradually over the final millennium. The soil and granite around and above pressed upon him. Compressed smaller and smaller in his tomb of death, he grew warm.
The bacteria and the archaea took their morsels of food and left behind the pieces they could not consume, and Alphonse suffocated in the hot, pressured subsurface.
“It is an important part of the story,” Stavo said.
And over this great span of time, Alphonse became petroleum.
“We must understand the time scale.”
* * *
Alphonse’s medical debt was cleared with enough money left over to buy fishing gear and a notebook at the small general store on the thoroughfare. He left Collimais. He left without saying goodbye. They’d try to stop him otherwise.
He walked, this time north, on the rutted dirt road leading into the belt.
As Alphonse walked, he turned to his earliest childhood memories. The happy home, councilors visiting into the night, voices drifting up the stairs to the bedroom where he would curl up with his stuffed lion while his mother sang to him. He remembered the voices from below, the discussions of rules, and safety, and wages. He remembered the lullabies too.
When did that pattern change? Was it before Grandfather died?
Shortly after he died, di Gof took Stavo’s place through the rarely-used process of acclamation. Di Gof wanted di Les on the Council, and when Alphonse’s mother first started with the industry a few years later, she began working with di Les. That’s when she’d first met Zelia Naida, the financier at Renico. The woman his mother had spoken with on the distavoc, the night of the gala.
Those four had worked together years ago.
When Alphonse was eleven, di Gof and di Les wrote a bill requiring full employment to vote. Five of Sangal’s most progressive councilors—twenty percent of the Council and voices for the poorest residents—lost their seats that year.
He walked deeper into the belt, past mine shafts and cotton fields growing green and red. He was alone again, passing time with Turaset. Each night he pulled out his notebook and added new recollections. He noted the years. The cities. The payouts, not always with Zelia involved, but often enough. He pulled the pieces apart and pushed them together in new ways, trying to find the core of his mother’s drive.
He remembered a day when she said something about the Council changing more quickly at last. Had it been on a birthday? Had she called it a gift? Di Gof and di Les—they’d written a law to permit councilors to swap between cities. How such a thing had passed in a representative democracy baffled Alphonse, but they’d managed it, and Lydia di Cur moved to Beschel in northern Delsina Province.
Mother started working at a provincial level when I turned twelve.
A few years later, she funded cand
idates in Narona, in Renivia Province, which had very little to do with Delsina Province otherwise.
Deep in the belt, Alphonse’s notes grew longer by the day. They pointed to the industry and they pointed to the economy. His grandfather had once said that agriculture underpinned the economy more broadly than combustion ever had, but now combustion sold in the belt.
He needed to know more about the belt, how it worked and its economic needs, and any risk combustion might pose out here.
So, Alphonse made his way to a pair of neighboring steads. On one, pigs snorted in the morning air. The other looked to have something to do with logging. A smell of pine hung in the air and sounds of sawing and yelling came from an outbuilding. Alphonse walked up to an open-air barn where two men and a woman worked a log by hand, arguing back and forth about sharpening the blade.
He was at the entrance before they noticed him.
The thinner man, who had hair sticking sideways from under his hat, waved the other two down and strode up to Alphonse. “Get off my land.”
Alphonse blinked at the tone and took a step back. “I’m sorry. I’m looking for work, and I heard steaders hire. My name’s Alphonse di Artur.”
He held out his hand. The man ignored it. “Y’ don’t just walk up.”
Alphonse stood straighter, thinking three people couldn’t possibly pull down very many trees, especially if their blades were dull, but this man didn’t seem to be hiring. He lowered his arm. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”
“Hold on. You from the cities?”
Even with a scrub of a beard, Alphonse didn’t look like a steader, and his accent was a sure giveaway. “Yes.”
The man measured him up and down. “You walk here?”
“I . . . guess. Yes.”
The two others, over near the sawing braces, had watched the exchange. The man looked surly, but the woman seemed content. Relaxed.
Still aggressive, the thin man said, “Why’d’ja walk all the way here?”
It was a good question; it must look ridiculous. Alphonse jammed his hands in his pockets and met the man’s eyes. He said, almost hoping the steader would disagree, because an argument suddenly sounded fun, “I like walking.”
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