“Woulda been easier.”
“Easier? What about Jack?”
“He works.” Nathan nudged another barrel back, grunting. Dark circles had formed under his arms.
“So do I.”
“You did. Sometimes. You’re pullin’ a few bags. Maybe you feel like it. You’re like a crop that’s s’posed to give a bushel per acre but only gives half. Why would anyone plant that?”
Myrta’s breath caught.
Nathan wiped his forehead against his sleeve and muttered, “Least you’re gone now.”
Her rage boiled up, and she didn’t try to stop it. “Nathan.”
He faced her and she punched him, as hard as she could, imagining her hand clear through his skull. The blow landed directly under his eye, and he fell back with a groan.
Her knuckles stung, and she threw her fist into the bags and said, “Some things don’t grow in fields. Some things aren’t even food.” She jumped down and stormed back to the pasture, barely able to see where she was going.
Somehow Jack was there. He was supposed to be talking to Manny, but here he was, and he was looking at the wagon, at Nathan struggling up. He let out a low whistle. “Did you sock Nathan?”
She fixed him eye to eye. “I did.”
* * *
The wagons worked down the east-facing flank, and she drove the team because Alphonse couldn’t do any more than huddle in the corner of the seat. The acrid tang of smoke coated her sinuses, her throat.
Her blanket was gone. Someone must have used it during the fire. She’d gotten choked up; it had been the last piece of her life from before.
She wanted the blanket and instead had a knife.
Alphonse shifted his weight onto her, leaning against her with his eyes closed and mumbling about lava, saying fragments of things, about his home and serving on a council. It made no sense. But the feeling of trust in how he leaned on her was a comfort. Myrta put an arm around him.
They reached the narrow flatlands in the early evening. She helped Alphonse off the wagon and he sat quietly while she pitched his tent. She told him to wait, that she’d bring him water and something to eat, but when she returned he was asleep inside.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Alphonse stood on the edge of a bustling city under a single sun. Far away, rigs pulled oil from the ground. “They’re taking all the carbon.”
“Earth spent a long time storing that.”
“I remember.”
“There were many forests. Many microbes. Ten percent of planetary history.”
“Yes, yes. I know. They’re burning it too quickly. It’s going into the air too quickly. Don’t they see the risk? Don’t they remember the blue-green bacteria and the trees? Volcanoes? Don’t they understand atmospheric chemistry or planetary physics?”
Stavo’s voice was heavy with grief. “Some do. Others . . . others know only that they grow rich.”
* * *
Alphonse stood in a bustling city, on a distant world called Earth.
No, he lay flat on his back in a tent on Turaset.
The bustling city remained with him, as did the tent. City odors stung his sinuses, and he leaned over to smell the canvas, but that wasn’t it.
Years earlier, in school, one of his teachers had described a mental state. Sensato, one of the ancestral genetic modifications engineered into human DNA. It was supposed to record history, or access time, something like that, through base methylation or epigenetic inheritance. There had been too many modifications to learn, and he hadn’t paid close enough attention.6, 7 His mother had called most of them nonsense anyway. But now, Alphonse stood in a city under a single sun, even though Turaset had two.
Then, his childhood dream of the library surfaced. The memory from so long ago, when he stood in light with his grandfather.
One by one, every sensato dream came back to him.
Alphonse was cold and hungry, trading cloth during the rise of commerce, willing to kill to survive. He was a young hominid at the discovery of fire. He stood on Earth when a meteor destroyed two thirds of its large species.
The trees and giant insects. The age of plants. Alphonse felt again the pressure of granite and the millions upon millions of years to form petroleum. He remembered starving, floating, dehydrating, and evolving as a single cell, and he saw the whole world frozen because of him, a blue-green bacterium.
Alphonse saw back to the beginning, when the planet was lifeless and meteors bombarded its molten surface.
The memories ran forward then, and he recalled in perfect detail the story of the planet’s formation, the origin of life to the oxygenation of the atmosphere and formation of ozone. He knew every cycle, every step of evolution’s march, each cause for each effect.
Alphonse became planetary history.
And in the last pulse of his heart, humans rose to dominance. Within that short span of time, in the last moment, they found coal, and oil, and gas. They pulled it from the ground and burned it, releasing the massive tonnage of carbon and time back into the air.
The weight of history crushed him, epochal change ripping apart his own life; it was too much, and he became a speck, whirling away to nothingness. No one could survive the knowledge, the context, the immensity of time. He disintegrated. He was detritus in an ocean of events, atoms cycling and swirling.
His consciousness unraveled, words abandoned him, then space, then meaning, then awareness gone . . . and he was not . . . and . . .
A thread wrapped itself around the nothingness, the cloud of un-being that could have been, in another universe, a sitting councilor writing legislation to drill the ranges. The thread found him and anchored into him like a line.
Stavo was there. Standing with Alphonse through all four-and-a-half-billion years, laughing and encouraging. It was the barest of glimmers to cling to, a hint of a path through the wilderness, the abyssal depths. It was a mere filament, the possibility to spool his sanity together, the chance that perhaps his experience meant . . .
“Grandfather?” he croaked in the tent.
The story is not over. The thought faded.
Still, he could not fix on this moment, this place of being.
He struggled to emerge from the tent but couldn’t open the flap. I am the chimney. I am the world. I am a cell. He tried to assimilate the knowledge, the billions of years. He stumbled out among the tents in the gray morning, and his mind zeroed back. For a moment he was Alphonse again. Out and in, through the past and present, the planet in its iterations. Cycles.
He was disassembled thought. Alphonse couldn’t find himself. He was time. He was a planet. He was history.
Awareness centered somewhere near his head, but also extended to the oxen and trees, the rocks and dirt. There were cells there too . . . He tottered around in the hazy dawn. “Grandfather, where are you?”
A steader yelled, “We’re tryin’ t’ sleep!”
This is insanity.
Alphonse climbed into the corner of the wagon seat that morning, hunched. Myrta took the lines and drove without saying a word. The day rolled by in a haze.
They pulled into the outskirts of Sangal in the late afternoon. He couldn’t unfurl. He smelled hints of sewage and oil, and pulled every part of himself closed.
“Are you okay?” Myrta asked quietly. Gray and brown smudges dirtied her face, her hands, her clothes. “You should lie down again.”
“No.” His tongue was too thick. His skull buzzed with electricity. My fingers aren’t in my hands. “Need to go home.” Panic fought up and confusion pushed down, and through it all was a profound desire to cease. I . . . can’t . . .
Myrta’s hand was on his shoulder. “You look horrible.”
He slipped off the seat and caught himself on the side rail, shaking his head. Eons stretched through him. He stood next to a city, a for
est, a lifeless cliff.
Alphonse stumbled through the wagons, to the edge of them and into the city. Back on paved streets. Back among shops and businesses.
Sangal.
The smell of exhaust, putrid and sharp, enveloped him. That smell, carbon, powering the tools and the auts. Alphonse floundered in four-and-a-half-billion years of climate matching the movements of a single sun, the tilt of the planet’s axis, the actions of life.
People are another cycle.
He sat, suddenly, on a curb outside a random storefront and stared at nothing. We’re changing the air. We are like the trees. The volcanoes. The bacteria.
After minutes or hours, he stood, steadier, and walked to his mother’s street, to her door.
The high ceilings. The elaborate draperies and chandeliers. They were the same negligent display of wealth they’d always been. Only the unread society magazines on the front table had changed. He leaned against his knees. He tried to recall his argument against naming the belt and slowing combustion.
‘A beginning,’ his grandfather said.
Alphonse startled at the voice, but the front entry was empty. It must have been some memory of his grandfather in these rooms twenty years earlier.
He went upstairs. His mother faced away, working at her desk next to a narrow, stained-glass window.
Memories stared back. Her erect posture as she wrote something. The scent of perfume in the air. He used to think the scent was her, and he remembered the day he found it in a bottle.
Two walls of the room had been papered, if one could call it that, in leather, with elaborate murals carved into them. A horse pulled down by lions on one side. Wolves taking a tusked moarab on the other.
Awards of recognition stood on a low table in front of the divan. He used to do his school work there, on that very table of burled black sweetnut. The black-and-white grain swept him back to the age of trees, and he stood in a forest. He fought his way back to the present.
“Hello, Mother.”
She turned and her eyes flew wide. “Alphonse. Oh, thank Autore. You’ve been gone too long.” Standing so quickly her chair fell back, she crossed to him in three steps. Her face was haggard; her makeup poorly applied. She took him in a long hug. “You’ve lost weight.”
Tears welled up in him, in both of them. It had been years since she’d given such a strong sign of affection, of acceptance. Too many years spent scheming. All the personal touches swept to the side. Concern for one another’s welfare pushed down.
She took in his face again, and he hers, which was worn, but in it he saw the mother of his childhood, the woman whose laughter had always been a warm summer’s day. That lay there underneath her thinning skin and creased lines. She said, “You look barbaric.”
He laughed. He probably did, but suits and cologne made no sense in the belt. “I’m not sleeping. Can we talk? We need to discuss what you’re doing.”
He set her chair up and noticed a small statue on the desk, an award he hadn’t thought about in a long time. It was to his grandfather, in recognition of council service. She once said it helped her focus on the choices he’d made. Alphonse touched the small statue. “Do you remember how things were when . . . when I was little? You used to sing lullabies.”
“Of course.” She gave a puzzled shake of her head.
Something hot, a tear, tracked down his cheek. This was hard, opening up to her. She seemed confused at his display. But governing the belt, it can’t—I won’t. “I miss that.”
“Autore, Alphonse, you’re a grown man.”
History flashed through him and he wasn’t a grown man at all, but an ape-child. His mother held him close, told him the fire wouldn’t hurt, that they used it, like they used the tools.
‘We must ask if combustion is still our servant.’
The voice startled him again, and Alphonse glanced around the room. After a moment, he turned back to his mother. “Look. About your plans, for the Chancellery, we need to talk.”
Her eyes locked onto his. Her face was still.
“It’s . . . an extraordinarily bad idea to name the belt as a fourth province.”
A calculating frown appeared on her forehead, one that he knew too well. She was looking for the pressure point. It chilled him to see the expression directed at him.
“Why is that?” she said coolly.
He paced to the divan and back. “Mother. Autore. I’m not your adversary, I’m your son.” She was in there. He’d seen it. She had missed him; he’d bet his life on it.
Her face smoothed at his words.
And he knew three things that she responded to. He’d take them in order. “Putting the belt under provincial law would fundamentally change the continental economy, and not in the way you hope. The belt’s unregulated except by nature. They’re proud. They choose it. They like the rhythm, and—”
“They benefit from profit as much as the next person.”
He snapped, “If you cared about strangers’ finances you’d have helped the line workers years ago. Naming the belt as a province will create enemies. And you’ll undercut trade.”
She regarded him without saying a word. He waited, still she said nothing. “Do you need money? Do you not have enough money? Is that the driving issue here?”
She scoffed. “I’ve provided for you since Marco left. I’ve been mother and father to you. Look around.”
“Why the belt? Is it influence? You’re begging for a revolt. They’re the ones with the bargaining chips, not us. They’ll withhold lumber. Food. The cities will starve if you force this. What can we withhold—oil? They don’t need it.”
She sighed, watching his face but not seeming to focus upon it.
He said in a whisper, “You used to say I was all you had.”
“You were.”
The cold and callous way she said it chilled him and he choked out, “We’re family. Please. Just come back. I miss you.”
The look of bewilderment on her face was so complete he wondered if he’d read her wrong.
“I don’t have time for this. Alphie, truly, I’m glad you’re back. But things are moving, and I need to focus on the Congress.” She sat, turned to her notes, and picked up her pen. “You’ll feel better in the morning. There’s an event tomorrow. I want you in a new suit. Gray.”
He whispered, “I just got back.”
“Wear the black loafers.”
Planetary history flashed through him with a vengeance, and he wasn’t in the room at all. He was in a forest, on a plain, he wasn’t Alphonse but a molecule at the dawn of time melting into a raging inferno.
What is this?
Stavo said, ‘The beginning of order.’ Alphonse braced himself against the wall.
His mother scratched out a column of numbers, saying, “Have your hair cut and styled.” She glanced at him. “Shave.”
Rage compressed his chest. He sucked in as much air as he could. There was no oxygen.
“And take a bath. Immediately.”
Rational thought abandoned him. He held himself by force of will, as pressure pushed him smaller and smaller in the deep ocean.
“Autore, you smell like a common laborer.”
His punch flew hard and fast—and it was only at the last moment, in the midst of the throw, that he pivoted, putting his fist through stained glass instead of her. The window shattered, and pain flew up his arm. A purple shard jutted from his knuckle, which now bled. He pulled the jagged glass out in astonishment.
His mother stared at the hole he’d made. Her eyes blazed. “What the fierno was that?”
“Common laborers are the backbone of the economy. Grandfather worked for the people. Not for himself, but for others.”
Her eyes narrowed, focusing the blaze. A pinprick of light hurtled toward them from the heavens above. “Yes, his entire life. Wri
ting laws for others, working late hours, and serving others. But not this person. How this detail always escapes your notice is beyond me. He did not help this person, not when I was small nor as I grew.”
She spoke forcefully, stabbing her finger at the door and hallway beyond. “I adopted every thought he ever had, every philosophy. I cooked meals for him. I gave him a son-in-law, and I gave him a grandson.”
The pinprick of light grew larger and brighter.
“And when he planned law? With other women and men, downstairs? He relegated me here, to the upper floor, to tend to you with lullabies and rhymes, away from them, the ones with power, while they ate the food I prepared and talked about the importance of people. But not this person. Still, I laughed, and I smiled, and I agreed. And none of it mattered.” Her eyes strained wide.
The strike was imminent.
“And after that, a lifetime of absence from him, isolation from him and his mission, in the end—my father? Was killed because of the choices he made, serving others. He was a weak, impotent, ineffective little man who did not change one thing.”
The meteor struck, and the era shifted, the old regime obliterated. Ejecta rained from the sky.
She barreled on. “Change requires strength. My approach, by the way, includes you. I bring you into every effort because you are my child and I love you.”
Stavo’s voice was a mere hint. ‘I thought it a small choice, to spend so much time in the Council. I did not know it would have such . . . far-reaching consequences.’
Alphonse came back to the moment, standing straight. “Mother! Grandfather’s ideals stand on their own merit. A good government, driven by the people, is an expression of our best selves. You’ve tried a different way—you’ve tried it this way my entire life. And people work longer hours, with fewer safeguards, while you grow richer. It confirms everything he said. It shows he did make a difference. Now you work to establish a new province? To expand combustion? Why?”
“To prove he was wrong!”
Alphonse was a trader freezing in a village. In front of him stood another, her beast piled high with furs. He was starving, he was dying, and she had wealth around her neck. He threw his hands to it, grabbed at this stranger’s throat, this person so different from himself. If he could separate the wealth from the woman, he might survive.
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