The Unforeseen

by Molly Gloss

  After a while someone came. He felt the slight rasp of feet on the sand, saw a bare foot and then Jin, bending to see him.

  “You fell.” Not a question. In the darkness, the wind raised the boy’s hair so it made a soft russet crown around his head.

  Neye pushed sand out of his mouth with his tongue. When he could, he said, “Okay. Be okay. Minute.”

  Jin squatted near him. His hand reached for Neye’s knee.

  “Don’t! Touch!”

  The boy rocked back on his haunches, folded his arms on his chest, across the long yellow tunic blotched with wetness. “You might have broken something.”

  “No. Did’n’ break.” He had slipped the knee once before. He thought he should say that. To explain. But it was too many words to push out of his chest. He wanted to close his eyes. But the boy was still there, watching.

  “You look pretty pale,” Jin said, and inside his skull Neye could feel the light wordless sing of the boy’s compassion.

  He held his knee tightly and pushed himself with his left arm to sit. With his teeth clamped down hard against the sound he might have made. In a while he was able to say, “Go on back. I’m okay.” He thought he said it all right. The faint high whine was in the front of his head, behind his eyes.

  The boy made no move to go. He squatted watching, with his eyebrows cramped together. Behind him, the skiff was drawn up a little way on the sand. And beyond that, a hundred meters back along the rock shore, Lisel squatted waiting on the raft. She did not look toward them. She sat on her heels with her arms clasped round her knees while she looked out at the water.

  Maybe the boy saw him looking. He said, “She thought maybe it was . . . a ruse or something. You understand?”

  Neye squeezed his hand carefully against his leg and then bent the knee slightly, testing, putting a little weight on the heel of his foot. Then he swung his good leg under him and rose to that knee, with the other leg extended stiffly out.

  “Can I help you?” Jin was standing again, but bent over him with his palms on his thighs.

  “No.”

  He pushed up hard on the good knee, with the heel of his other foot braced against the ground. He almost made it up. But the dark sky slipped off sideways and he felt Jin’s hands taking hold of him, buttressing him as he tottered. Neye leaned against the boy and waited until the line of the sea came level.

  “Thanks,” he said, when his breathing had leveled out too. He made as if to stand away, but the boy’s hands gripped him tightly.

  “I’ll help you to the boat.”

  He took in a breath carefully, so it made no sound. “No. I just slipped the knee. It’ll loosen up. If I walk on it.”

  Jin let go with one hand so he could push the wet red hair back from his forehead. With his other hand he continued to hold Neye’s arm. “You’re in a lot of pain,” he said. “Don’t let Lisel . . .”

  “Go on back,” Neye said. He looked down at the beach, past the skiff and the raft and the woman, to the headland bulking dark against the horizon.

  Jin let his hand drop from Neye. “I’m sorry about her. She just . . .” He made a loose gesture as if, with that, he explained something.

  “Go on back.” Neye was squeezing his thigh with one hand but he thought he was standing pretty straight. He just did not quite put all his weight on the leg. Not while the boy was there.

  After a while Jin said, “Okay.” But it was a little while more before he went away, pushing the skiff so it grated quietly off the sand.

  Neye took a step. And again. He was sweating softly, grinding his teeth. Behind him, he heard Jin and then Lisel, no words, just the hissing sounds of their argument. He pushed his leg out and out and out, stepping along the dark sand. Then he heard the skiff, the faint slip of it going through the water, slanting across the cove toward the buildings grown suddenly more distant. He did not look that way. Not at the boat. Not at the buildings. He watched his feet, the prints they made in the sand. He squeezed his leg high above the pain and pushed it out and out, following the strand of pale beach that went away ahead of him into the darkness.

  • • •

  He had not had the strength to drag the khirtz tent out of his duffel and inflate it, so he’d lain on the grass on the lee side of Jin’s shed and pulled a plastex sheet about him and slept that way, curled around the pain. At dawn Jin came and stood over him. He did not hear the boy’s feet in the grass, only felt him there suddenly and opened his eyes to the narrow shape he made against the sky, against the colorless morning.

  “You’re okay?” Jin said.

  “Yes.”

  The boy shifted his weight. Finally he squatted down beside Neye with his palms together, pressed between his knees. “I heard you come up from the beach last night.” There was something he wanted to say, maybe another apology on behalf of Lisel. But while Neye waited for him to push it out, she came toward them up the path from the cobb racks, and when the boy saw her, he stood and pushed his hands into the pocket of his shirt. He and Lisel were both stiff-faced. She looked at him once, glancingly, and then dropped her eyes to Neye.

  “Registry must have come on hard times,” she said, so it was harsh and scoffing. “Or have they always taken the lame and halt into their service?”

  He was almost too tired for anger. In a little while he made a sound, a slight release of air, and pushed against his hands to sit up. He was very careful. He did not think there was any change in his face that she would be able to detect; but his hair had come free of its clasp and when it swung forward across his cheeks in a dark, loose drape, he didn’t push it back. He braced one leg out stiffly, pushing up on the other to stand. He had thought he might need to put his hand against the wall of the shed to prop himself, but he stood unsupported, straight, and he looked straight at her from beneath the thick forelock of his hair. “If it becomes a chronic problem, they will probably ask me to get a plastic knee. In the interim, I’ll try to be more careful.” He looked at Jin and then back at Lisel. “No one,” he said, “is responsible for my health. No one but me.”

  What he had felt in her, earlier, was not anger but mistrust and a vague stirring of discomfort that verged on regret. She said irritably, “Even if I were a healer, I could not rebuild a knee. It’s only the autonomic nervous system that they—”

  He pushed his hand through the air in a cutting-off gesture of impatience. “I know what they can do.” He was aching and very tired and he did not care that her face flared with annoyance. “If I want my knee repaired, I’ll have a surgeon do it. If I’m in pain, I can take a drug. There’s nothing I want from you but obedience to the law. If you have a healing gift, register it. Make yourself available in emergencies. I don’t want anything else.”

  There was only sullenness in her face. She went on past him then, silently. But he had felt for a moment a surprising needle-pointed sliver of her anguish. And found, with another kind of surprise, that there was no pleasure, no triumph in it, only uneasiness.

  Jin had stood silently beside him with his hands in his pocket and his eyes fixed on his feet. Now, with Lisel gone, he looked diffidently at Neye. “Did you ever know anyone who was a healer?”

  Neye shook his head. But he had seen, once, a healing. A man had touched a woman who was bleeding from an artery. He had put both his hands on her, on the hole in her neck, and in a moment she had stopped spurting blood. By the time the ambulance came, there was a thin brown scab on the wound.

  He was still thinking of that, seeing it, when Jin said, “Her father’s mother was a healer. I told you that. Well, she died of old age, essentially, when Lisel was ten or eleven. At fifty-three. Which is how old Lisel is now.”

  Neye looked at the boy. His chest began to feel heavy, as if from fatigue.

  “She was a metallurgist,” Jin said. “Three or four times in the lab she used her gifts—burns, probably, but Lisel didn’t say. And a couple of times, other places, when she just happened to be there. Once I guess a bus hit a
downdraft and crashed on the footway right in front of her house. Maybe there were a dozen times, altogether, that she . . . was useful. But. Every day. There were these people who came. Amputees wanting her to regenerate tissue. Quadriplegics. Every terminal and incurable and hypochondriac on the continent. They’d stand around her door when she’d come out or go in and they’d touch her, grab at her sleeve or her wrist, like they thought that would do the healing, like she was a holy font and all they had to do was put their hands in the water. Because it isn’t medicine, after all, is it? It smells supernatural or something, and that’s what would draw them. Still draws them. She’d explain it to them, or sometimes I guess she’d have to try first, and afterward she’d explain. They were hardly ever angry. They’d just thank her and go away, all quiet, with their shoulders pulled in, and the next day another one or two or three of them would be there waiting by her door. They just . . . wore her out. One by one. By the time she was fifty-three.”

  Neye stood hunched as if he was protecting himself from blows. He was able to see, still, the woman with the hole in her throat, the man’s small blunt hands touching her. So he was able to wait, steadily and stubbornly, until he was sure the boy had finished. Then he looked up.

  “It’s a great gift,” he said, as though that needed no proving. “If I had it, I would maybe have felt it worth the trade-offs. And I think Lisel never asked her that, her father’s mother. Whether she thought it was worth it.” Behind his eyes, irresistibly, he saw the others: the thin, solemn face of Cirant, his son, who would surely have died anyway, like the ones who waited before the door of Lisel’s grandmother. And the face, too, of that grandmother, graven with unendurable, endless griefs.

  • • •

  Now that they had done with the fence, Lisel and the boy began to work the reefs, culling out the old exhausted banguii and replanting with freezer-fresh “seed.”

  The cove held at least a million and half cubic meters of cropland, artificial reefs, all planted to banguii. The cobb growing on those racks in the shallows would be a high-yield investment if they made it to harvest, but they were notoriously difficult to raise—vulnerable to disease and several kinds of predators and, sitting up high that way in shallow water, prey to storm damage and drought. The banguii was the money crop.

  Twice a year their legs could be harvested, all six legs behind the forward clapperclaws, and they’d simply grow new ones, and continue to do so over a useful life-span of four or five years, while the legs diminished in size a little with every cutting. It was necessary only to feed them keefish, and the kee were easy to grow, generally needing only a bubblefence to keep them in and a pelleted food that could be pressed from banguii by-products and seaweed. The kee’s other predators, larger and quicker and able to wipe out a school at one meal, seldom hazarded the small pores of reefs or the aggressive pincers of banguii. It was a neat, self-sustaining microecology, so wherever the offshore was suited, it was a prevalent companion cropping.

  Lisel had planted successively, with all the oldest crop bunched just shoreward of the fence line along the north margin of the cove. Neye could follow the stream of bubbles from the submersible reaper, crosshatching back and forth there between the rocks of the northern headland and the anchored bylander, but Jin and Lisel didn’t ride in the reaper; they followed behind it, seeding by hand, working as ever from the raft, while the submersible found its own way up and down the furrows between the reefs.

  Neye did not climb out on the rocks to watch them. His knee was hurting him. And he thought Lisel’s fear might be old and stiffened. He wanted to let her alone a little, back away, let her come in on her own if she would. So for quite a while he sat as he had the first day, watching them benignly from the salt grass of the dunes above the buildings.

  The storm stood just off the coast. There was a light wind at sea level, lifting spray so the air was chill and damp, but there was little rain and no gale. He thought maybe the front would after all slide north and past them. Still, it was cold sitting high and idle there, and he could see little of Lisel from this distance. So finally, in the afternoon, he went down to where he had left his duffel by Jin’s shed and he heated coffee and sat with his back against the building and his hands wrapped around the warmth of the cup.

  He had assumed they would work until the light failed. But as he sat bored and faintly glum with a gelid pack on his knee, the boy came alone up the slope from the beach. Neye had thought both of them indifferent to the cold, but now he was near enough to see the cracks in Jin’s lips and the roughened skin of his arms.

  The boy gestured toward Neye’s outstretched leg. “Okay?”

  Neye tore off the cold-pack, flexed his knee and pushed to stand, as though there was no pain. “Yes. All right now.”

  Jin made a stiff smile. “Sure.” And went on past him to one of the dobes, came out again with a couple of amphibious drone carts set up to haul something—many somethings—tall and thin and vertical.

  “I thought you were replanting.”

  Jin had already started the carts down toward the cobb beach, and Neye, following, pushed his leg long-strided to keep up. The boy flapped one hand vaguely toward the overcast. “We thought this would roll by us. It was supposed to. But now Lisel thinks it’s coming in, and she’s usually right. So we’ll move the cobb. As many as we can before the weather turns, or the tide, whichever is first. They drift, you know. When there’s a heavy sea, they just let go and drift until things calm down, and then the ones that don’t end up high and dry set up housekeeping in the new neighborhood. You can lose a whole crop that way.”

  He seemed not much worried, at least not yet, just in a hurry. He and the carts, with Neye trailing, went quickly down through the dunes to the beach where Lisel was already wading out among the rows of cobbs. The racks came apart from the piers in their original settling tank configuration, big open frames gridded with crosspieces, all the surfaces spangled dark with the knobby, algae-slick shellbacks of mollusks. The tide was out, or nearly so, and Lisel worked the outermost row first, standing to her chest in the water, then climbing the piers, uncoupling the latches there and lifting the frames out and down, one by one, pushing them through the water to Jin, who stacked them upright between the struts of the cart.

  For a while Neye stood on the dry sand above the mud flats, watching them. He couldn’t see that the weather had worsened at all, maybe had even lightened. And his knee was aching, not greatly but steadily. And Lisel seemed not to see him there. So for a while he only stood and watched.

  When they filled a cart, Jin followed it up out of the water and along the trough of dunes to the tide pond. And while he was there, off-loading, Lisel worked the other end alone, lifting a frame out and then balancing it with one hand, climbing down laboriously herself to put it on the other cart. Neye watched her do that three or four times. Then he went across the low rise to the tide pond, going all the way out on the mud to where the boy was hanging racks on the low piers.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll send the cart back when I get it unloaded.”

  Jin looked at him once, not very surprised, not speaking, and went off at a trot. After that, Neye saw only the drones as they purred up the sand from the beach, one and then the other, freighted with slick, wet racks of mollusks.

  The pond was meant to hold only the young spat, the graduating class from a settling tank; there were four or five times as many racks of cobb out in the cove as there were piers here in the pond. So when the hanging space was gone, he began to set the racks between rows, leaning them to rest on the others. The racks were plastic. Naked, they’d have been light, but they were crusted heavy with shellfish, and his shoulders and arms began gradually to ache from the monotonous, relentless lifting.

  He was just beginning the third rank, and the incoming tide stood to his thighs, when Lisel came walking in to him not from the mud flats but from the low rise that sheltered her buildings. She toted an insulated bag, holding it against her bod
y as if it were too heavy to hang by the handle.

  “You can eat with us,” she said, without quite looking toward him. She walked on past the pond and along the beaten-down track of the drones.

  Neye leaned a rack against the others and wiped his hands on his shirt and followed her, splashing up out of the water and through the last rise down to the beach. Jin was lying on the grass there, on his belly, with his head on one arm. Lisel squatted by him and began to haul food out of her bag, a couple of tall bottles, hunks of smoked fish, round stones of bread. She brought out a knife, too, sliced a tewit in half, put part of it in the hand Jin outstretched to her. And then, with a stiff gesture, she offered the other half of the tewit to Neye.

  He took it and sat on the damp grass a little way from her, with his legs drawn up in front of him. He would have liked to rub the ache from his knee, but he kneaded, instead, his stiffened shoulders, first one and then the other, with the fingertips of his free hand while he ate the tewit and looked out at the cobb racks. Not quite half of them were skeletal piers.

  Jin was propped up on his elbows now, his mouth and chin stained with the green juice of the fruit. He took a mug of coffee from Lisel and held it between his two hands.

  “I’ll bring the lights down here,” he said to her, “after we eat.” She nodded. She was cutting slices from a block of white cheese.

  Neye had not been much aware of the failure of daylight, only now saw that before the tide pushed over the last of the racks it would be dead dark. And there was a little wind, seeming sleety cold against his wet clothes. The leading edge of Lisel’s storm.

  She handed him coffee, pushed some of the food in his direction, and then herself began to eat, sitting cross-legged more or less between Jin and Neye.

  “I think she was worried about hypothermia,” Jin said, with his voice low as if he spoke a confidence, but leaning out past her to say it to Neye. “Otherwise, we’d never have been fed.”