“We didn’t come from here,” Benjamin jeered, with the selfconfidence of the possessor of an inarguable school-approved fact. “We came from Earth.”
Tessa eyed him. “I remember when the midwife pulled out a little screaming lump and Poppa named it Benjamin. So I can tell you that you didn’t come from Earth. Any further claims?”
“You know what I mean,” Benjamin began heatedly.
“This is no time for fighting,” Dom cautioned.
“Tell her that.”
“No need,” Tessa said with deliberate serenity. “No need, Earth-man.”
“I met her here,” Pcrin said dreamily, as if his children weren’t fighting around him.
“Momma?” Tessa said, argument forgotten. “Here in Stcrm Canyon?”
Perin nodded. “She was trying to free a fossil. I heard her swearing before I saw her. She thought she was alone and was embarrassed when she saw me. But I helped her.”
Tessa could almost see the scene: her impatient mother, young, at a disadvantage, but unwilling to reject the help, and Perin’s large, careful hands working a chisel around the delicate trapped fossil as he glanced, thoughtfully, at the odd woman he had unexpectedly cornered.
“Which fossil was it?” Tessa asked.
He frowned. “I don’t remember. It wasn’t very large. Kind of lacy. I’m sure it’s still in the collection somewhere.”
“And why were you here?” Dom and Benjamin leaned forward while Kevin dozed, curled up with a hand over his face. Her brothers were equally interested in the answers, but were willing to let her ask all the questions.
“A funeral, what else?” He looked up Sterm Canyon toward the cliffs that marked its end. “My mother’s, then. I had let the cart with my family go ahead, and was walking alone. After then, your mother walked with me.”
“You persuaded her to come with you?” Tessa was distressed to hear the tone of doubt in her voice. But how had the gentle, shambling Perin persuaded the intent Sora to leave her task, her joy, and come with him?
For the first time since his daughter had come home, Perin smiled, remembering. “No, Tessa. I wanted to go ahead alone. I had just stopped to help, nothing else. It was she who insisted on coming with me.”
Clearly unwilling to answer any further questions, Perin settled back, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. But traces of the just-passed smile remained on his face.
Before climbing to Topfield they spent the night at the funeral encampment, an open area around a water seep. One other family, with the body of a young child, stayed at the opposite end of camp, but the two families did not speak. In the morning, by unspoken agreement, the Wolholmes moved out at first light, taking the death cart as far as the base of the switchback Topfield trail.
Just where the trail rose toward its first switchback was a pair of giant fossil trilobites, each about two meters long. An entire five-meter layer of the cliff face was filled with such fossils, but these were by far the largest, flanking the path like guardians. Centuries of human hands touching them for luck had rubbed them smooth. Her mother had particularly thought of them as lucky, Tessa remembered, representatives of the native Koolan forces that the human settlers had yet to come to terms with. At home was a photograph of a four-year-old Tessa perched on one, smiling nervously.
It was a long heavy climb up the trail, trading off the weight of the pallet and their mother’s body. The spiky plants along the trail twisted slowly when they sensed the moisture of the human beings. Tear-drinking flies, a symbol of funerals, settled on their cheeks to reclaim some salty water. After several hours’ climb, Tessa leaned out and looked down the cliff face to the canyon below. The tiny figures of the family with the dead child were just commencing their climb. Their heads were down, concentrating on each step.
The cliff edge was sharp. One moment the Wolholmes were climbing desperately up the face, breath sharp in their lungs, the next they stood on the wide fleshgrass-covered expanse of Topfield. Fleshgrass lived on the bodies buried beneath it. When this barren high valley had become Calrick Bend’s community cemetery, there had been only sparse clumps of it here and there on bare dirt. Now it lapped up at the distant hills as if desperate to climb toward the higher mountains that loomed beyond.
Dom led the family a long way into the valley before finding a spot, no different than any other, that satisfied him. The flesh-grass was thick under their feet. Dom, Benjamin, and Tessa pulled out the folding shovels that had been stowed under the pallet and marked the grave. Kevin had brought, on his own, a toy shovel and with childish concentration straightened the line of his older siblings’ cut.
The soil beneath the fleshgrass was loose and easy to dig. It didn’t take long to empty a hole deep enough for their mother. The roots would grow through her in days. As far as Tessa knew, clothes and jewelry would remain below, for all the tales she’d heard of wedding rings being found waving on fleshgrass fronds. It was also said that high plainsmen sometimes descended from their encampments beyond the Boss and dug through the ground seeking valuables.
They slid Sora’s body off the pallet into the ground and covered her over. Tessa turned away as her mother’s still face vanished beneath the dry gray soil.
“We’ll survive, Sora,” Pcrin said, kneeling by the grave, “just like I promised you.”
Benjamin made an inarticulate sound in his throat and pointed. They all looked up.
No more than a hundred meters away stood a Great Wapiti, a huge quadruped, two meters at the shoulder, with curving knife-edged horns. It was a native of Koola, though had been given some approximate name from an animal of old Earth.
“My God,” Dom muttered. “It’s so close. So close!”
The wapiti stalked along, graceful and powerful, as if aware of their impotence and the solemnity of their task. At last, coming near a rock slope, it crouched and, with an incredible leap, vanished.
Benjamin looked after it. “Look!” He pointed. “A troop of high plainsmen. You can just see their horses. They must be hunting the wapiti.” Tessa squinted to see what he saw.
Dom didn’t even bother to glance up from pulling the fleshgrass over the grave. “Don’t be ridiculous. The Plateau is hundreds of kilometers farther, beyond the Boss. That’s the face of Evening Crest, Ben, and there aren’t any plainsmen there. You’re imagining things.”
“Am not.” Benjamin thrust his lower jaw out in a gesture Tessa remembered her mother making while arguing with Perin.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tessa said. “We have to get back to funeral camp before dark.”
So they turned and left Sora there beneath the grass.
❖
The funeral ceremonies had been, in their own way, more strenuous than the climb to Topfield. First there had been the argument over which symbol of their mother’s would be included in the Wolholme family ward. Tessa hadn’t quite dared suggest a trilobite fossil from the collection, and had found Perin’s final, and inarguable, selection, Sora’s favorite pair of pruning shears, eerily correct, despite its inadequacy. Tessa had tried to pick a fight without telling Poppa what it was about, but he had not risen to the bait, as Sora surely would have, and merely stuck his thick Wolholme fingers partway through the fine handles and clumsily clicked the blades to show by the mismatch how well they had, in contrast, fit Sora’s hand.
And after the attachment of the shears to the upper part of the ward, there had been the feast at long tables under the low-hanging branches of the family dilberry grove. All the families of Calrick Bend had sent representatives, even the most-high Dalhousies and Minishkins, some closer friends arriving with all generations. Tessa and her brothers had worked desperately to feed them all the spicy-sweet cakes that were always served at this event and no other. Dom claimed his butt had forgotten what a chair felt like. But their weariness was good, a prelude to relaxation, for the family would survive. Momma lay properly at Topfield, and the Wolholmes were back in their fields and groves.
Now Te
ssa sat alone under those dilberries, right at the side of the ward, and tried to think things through. She mended clothing as she considered, having learned long ago from Momma that no one would task her for wasting time on thought if she seemed to be doing something useful.
The ward was a tower of family symbols, and one stood beside each house, a sign of the family’s persistence. Some wards had bases of mysterious silvery metals brought from Earth, metals poor Koola could no longer make. And more than one ward rested on a vivid green-blue sphere representing that far-away planet, Mother of All. The Dalhousies, for example, had been big on Earth, and wished this known. For all Tessa knew, they had owned that planet and come to Koola only on holiday, to be stuck here by an unexpected change of interplanetary transport schedule.
The oldest things Tessa could see in the high-tension ceramic matrix of the Wolholme ward’s base could not have been much more than a century old, more than two centuries younger than the initial settlements on Koola: an enamel portrait of a woman holding a child, a man’s bronzed sun hat, and another pair of pruning shears, these with long curved blades.
“Ah, Theresa.” Though heavy, Dalka could move quietly when she had a mind to. She sat down next to Tessa and dropped her bag. “Now we can get to business.” She paused, and frowned. “Why are you wasting so much thread on those rear buttons?”
“Benjamin catches them on trellises and rips them off.” Tessa was deliberately patient with Dalka’s interference even in trifles. She hoped Dalka noticed. “He likes to climb.”
“We all do, when we’re young. Well, even when we’re not. At least that foolish city school Sora insisted on sending you to hasn’t ruined you completely for real life.”
Tessa felt the power and oppression of village life settling over her like a weighted bird net. “Momma had good reasons for sending me there. If the Wolholmes are to survive—”
“If the Wolholmes are to survive, dear, you’re going to have to see to it. Sora, poor dear, married for love.”
“Careful, Dalka.” To her surprise, Tessa found herself on the verge of losing her temper. She carefully folded Benjamin’s coveralls.
“Now, now.” Dalka chuckled. “I’m not attacking poor Perin, darling. But you have more responsibilities than a lady should, and less help in carrying them out.” She pulled something from her bag and held it out to Tessa. “Recognize this?”
“People call them judeflowers.” Tessa looked at the bundled leaves and petals and remembered both her mother’s lessons and her botany class at Hammerswick, though reconciling the two was sometimes difficult. “It has a false stem that’s actually fused bracts.” She raised her eyebrows.
“Goodness, what a clever child Sora raised. Do you know its uses?”
“No, Dalka, I don’t.”
“Oh dear, don’t be so angry.” Dalka put the flowers back in her bag. “They serve as a constituent of a coordinating enzyme substrate for fat-soluble vitamins. We use them to grow an intestinal yeast for hiking the back country. An inoculation lasts maybe two-three weeks, residing in the ileum of the small intestine. Enough for a good overpass hike, if not to live permanently in the high plains. Lord knows how the high plainsmen do it.” She sighed. “There are real mysteries up there, girl. They’ve done some first-rate enzyme work.”
“Momma talked about that... but she never taught me.”
“Of course not, dear. You were too young to appreciate the subtlety of it—and the subtlety’s everything and why men don’t fiddle with it.” Dalka put her arm around Tessa. “Humans wouldn’t be able to live on Koola a day if it weren’t for the tailored yeasts and bacteria we women produce in our little kitchen fermenters. It scares men, you know. Best thing about it, really. Tell them tailored bacteria, and they come up with stories of dead bodies with nervous systems full of living microbes lurching down from the high burials to find the doors they were carried out of.” She shook her head in rueful amusement. “So they build special doors for corpses while we tighten the knots in the Web.”
“The Web?” Tessa found the catechism annoying.
“The Web that keeps us from falling into the crevasses right under life on Koola. It’s supported us since time im-mem-morial.” Dalka lingered over the word as if it was a particularly delicious chocolate. She waved her arm, fat jiggling. “Take these dilberries, for example.”
Tessa looked up at the purple oil-containing fruit dangling just above them.
“If these trees were left alone,” Dalka said, “they’d die out. Nothing fertilizes them naturally. But they’re held by the Web. Men distract little wasps into them by hanging tangleflowers all over the trees. A paltry male secret. Did you ever look at those flowers and wonder why they were there?”
“I did, but—”
“But you thought it was all for love!” Dalka barked a laugh. “Well, we’ll see next spring, won’t we? Then I bet you won’t be sorry to be back from school.”
Tessa saw no need to respond to the sally. Lush tangleflower blossoms cascading from the branches, their intoxicating scent filling the dilberry groves, were a symbol of romance. It was a commonplace that a girl, having made love to her first boy under the trees, returned home with her loose hair full of tangleflower petals.
“Who invented it all, Dalka?” Tessa kept her thoughts on the matter at hand.
Dalka slowed for the first time. “It’s been done since time im-mem—”
“You said that.” Tessa’s lessons at Hammerswick came to her rescue. “But the ancestors of dilberries are native to Koola, while the wasps are gene-modified and come from Tal-Tal-Monga, famous for its biological products. And the tangleflowers—no one knows. So who put them all together?”
“That’s the magic of the Web.” Dalka retreated into obscurity. “And Sora wished you to learn its secrets.”
“Yes, Dalka.”
❖
Tessa started the next morning by hanging vegetables up to dry. The long dark-blue roots would, in a few weeks, taste like thick, greasy meat. No one in the upper Shield valleys favored the taste, but city dwellers on the edge of the Great Flats enjoyed it, for some reason. They were stupid enough to live down there in the thick air and so could not be expected to have sense about other things.
With mindless meticulousness, she quartered the arm-long tubers and strung them on the rack. She would take a stroll about the kitchen garden whenever her arms got tired and look off across the farms to the other wall of the canyon. At that moment farming seemed so painful that it had obviously been ordained by God as punishment for unknown sins.
She’d brought books back from Hammerswick but had progressed little in reading them. There was always some task to interrupt her, whether it was Benjamin’s hand, cut on a trellis, or the filth that accumulated in the house as if delivered daily by some unusually dutiful service, or simply the countless varieties of plant that grew in the canyon to be harvested every month. She had been able to spend very little time with the upstairs fossil collection, its complex Koolan taxonomies worked out in Sora’s careful hand, and longed to find out more about this, her mother’s private fascination. There were times now when she saw the farms and fields of Calrick Bend for what they were: a microscopically thin overlay of human action over an alien and enigmatic planet. That did not make the tubers any lighter.
After one turn about the garden she found Benjamin himself. He sat on the side stairs by the drying rack, paying diligent attention to the tension swivels on his dart rifle. He’d pulled the webbing off and was deliberately tightening it, strand by strand.
She sat down next to him. “Going hunting, Benjamin?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look at her but bent his head to his task. “It’s something that’s got to be done.”
Tessa looked at her younger brother’s curly-haired head. What made men so certain about things that were only guesses, presumptions, and dreams? “There’s plenty that has to be done here.” He finally looked up at her, his dark eyes appraising. “I know tha
t. One thing is that I’m going to get that wapiti. The one, you remember, at Momma’s burial. That’s number one. Then me and Dom can get this family working again.”
Tessa fought down the anger that came at this childish arrogance. “How is killing the wapiti going to help?”
“I’ve been in the high valleys. It’s still up there. Something’s brought it down from the Boss. But I can find it. And kill it.”
“That’s good, Benjamin. But right now you can come and help me finish hanging these vegetables.”
He looked disgusted. “Come on. That’s your job. I have more important things to do.”
“Like hunting wapiti.”
“Like hunting wapiti.” His voice rose. “Like seeing that this family doesn’t just disappear.”
“We won’t disappear. But it takes work. We all have to work.”
“Don’t talk to me like that!” Benjamin was near tears. “You’re not Momma. You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t run this family—”
Tessa felt her temper starting to fray. “I’m not trying to run this family.”
“Dom. Dom and I can run this family. We know what to do. We don’t need you messing into it.”
This was too much. Before he could react, Tessa darted forward, seized him with a strength she hadn’t known she had, and hung him up by his belt on the drying rack. He yelped. She looked at him in satisfaction. “You can just hang up there with the rest of the vegetables until you dry out.”
Completely forgetting his manly demeanor, Benjamin broke into tears. He wailed and kicked his legs.
“What the hell is this?” Dom strode past Tessa and regarded his brother. Benjamin choked down his sobs. Dom shook his head and pulled him off. Not looking at either of his siblings, Benjamin ran into the house, head down.
“You forgot your dart rifle!” Tessa shouted after him.
Dom bent over and picked it up. He looked at her. Annoyance and amusement vied for control of his face. “Now, Tessa, what did you have to go and do that for? Things are tough enough for him. His pride—”
The Breath of Suspension Page 22