by Molly Gloss
He made a slight, sheepish hand sign, a sort of pushing away. “No. Not that sick. Anyhow, I’ve just got started. I ought to get the cross done so I don’t lose track of what I’ve done.” Menders had each their own style of working a field, few of them crawled the same sail in just the same way. It was Aric’s habit to run up a mast then down on the diagonal, go across the yard and upward diagonal again, cutting the field into diamonds. “I’ll quit when I’ve run the ex.” And then, beginning to smile, “It must be this damn baby’s face, eh? You’re aiming to mother me, now your own has grown up and flown away from you.”
He meant Ĉejo, seventeen. He would not know—would have been a child then himself—one of her babies had flown away from her by dying. She hunched one shoulder up, deflecting the little irritation, if that was what it was. “Go on, then, if you want,” she said, and made a mouth, a smiling frown. She lifted her hand in a quick, half-peevish good-bye, and pulled out along the six-yard, taking herself off swiftly until Aric had fallen out of sight across the luff of his field and she was alone again.
She had an old, leathery callus that protected her in such moments, but he had got by it a little. She never had been inclined to mother anything sick, that was the sore point. It had been Humberto who had clasped their first son to his breast in the first colicky weeks, muttering useless wordless sounds of comfort, walking round the room and round in his flat bare feet, while Juko sat on the floor making wicker, or peeling oranges. She had liked Ĉejo rather better at three and four, thin sweaty arms wrapped round her neck, solemn kisses pressed on her lips. But by then she and Humberto had made a second son, and sometimes in those days she had gone on lying in her bed with the heels of her hands against her ears while that son was crying, crying, and other people had brought Vilef to her breast, brought him to lie over her unmoving heart, and it was only afterward, when he was dead, that she had felt the slow beating behind the bone.
People liked to say romantic love was a childish sentiment, something you ought to get over with in your green years. To marry a lover is fatal, people said. Everyone knew, the relationship of lovers was transient, electrical, while marriage above other things must be a durable partnering, a system of mutual reliance, a friendship. Family and neighbors were expected to indemnify a marriage by anchoring it in patience, affection, and support; and Juko’s family had mostly followed that charge. She had been given, in Humberto, a husband who was melancholy, passive, prone to chronic physical complaints—but someone of tolerance and stillness, someone disposed to agree with her values and judgments, an undistinguished, predictably tender sexual partner, a conscientious father to their sons. The Senlima Clearness Committee had admired the tying of their wedding knot. And counseled its unraveling. People had blamed that divorce on Vilef’s unhappy birth, but she and Humberto, both of them, always had understood: It was Vilef’s death, not his birth, that was to blame. Humberto never had been able to forgive her for receiving her son’s death as a gift, and she unable to forgive him for his unequivocal, stubborn devotion to grief.
Now her marriage with Bjoro, without children at its center, but tied to Kristina in a complicated gyre of mother-son, husband-wife, daughter-mother, was altogether unsentimental; everything between them was arguable, everything sufficient, abiding. She had, as she thought, reinvented marriage, and it had been years since she had thought of the Plum Rains at the end of her old divorce. But she was adrift, today, in the wake of a vague resonance. The narrow, explicit lonesomeness that had come up in her body when she had stood at the head of the weathermast had become a kind of homesickness, a bleary unfocused pining.
Her own pattern of mending was to circle a field at the yards and masts, repairing the halyards and smoothing the tangles, and then to drift inward slightly and inward again, spiraling toward midsail, looking for tears. While her body rose and fell on the slow breath of the sail, she made the wide smooth circle around the field and then around again, a chip of wood borne in on the eddy, circling. The silvery web of sails wheeled languidly, the star field turning with it. She kept from looking starward but she felt herself turning with the sails, felt the small orange sun holding steady in the vast blackness, and gradually she began to feel the muddy mood suspended about her like the depthless sky. She began to work well, to work habitually, not thinking of Bjoro finally nor the Lark, nor even of old marriages and dead children.
Someone said “Hans!” in a sudden yell drawn out long on a fading note. There was a small silence, a surprised dumbness among them all. Finally someone said, “Hey, Sonja. What?” for Sonja and Hans were cousins—one of them had an aunt who had married the other’s uncle—and everybody knew Hans was orbiting in the Ruby, waiting with Arda while the Lark carried the other four down to landfall.
Sonja laughed. There was not much timidness in that woman anywhere. “Oh hell. I can’t hardly believe I did that. Oh hell. I guess I was just sending him a sort of kiss or a marker buoy or something. I’m up the head of the spanker and from here you can see forever or what passes for it, and I all at once had to send his name out on the wind, eh?” Juko, looking, made out the tiny thread-end trailing from the tip of the spankermast, Sonja Landsrud standing as Juko earlier had done, at the rim of the sail staring sunward. We are all gone a little mad these days.
There was only a brief silence and then it was Orval Wyho who said, flat and short, “The ŝimanas, I guess. It’s put you over the edge.” Orval always had a crabbed way of speaking; you knew his voice on the obscuring incom. Some of them laughed, making an indistinguishable noise.
“Hey, Juko, you’d better leave a word for Bjoro too!” There followed a smacking sound, wet, a loud kiss.
“Who’s to yell for Arda, then, and Peder? They’ll be lost.”
“Arda! Here’s for you, dear!” “Luza!” “Hey, Isuma!”
“H-A-L-L-O-O-O the Ruby!” “Hey, Lark!”
Juko had no impulse to call to Bjoro, but she had liked Sonja hailing the boat that way, girlish, not grown too staid yet nor too reasonable. So on the little momentum of the other voices, she yelled once too, “Bjoro!” hearing it come out stiff and fierce-sounding.
There was a lot of laughter, a choppy noise. Then Romeo Thorkildsen, from the sailchart desk in the hub, sounded through it with his steady voice, unamused. “Can’t hear a damn thing, you know, mid that racket,” and made them subside. In the short silence afterward, it seemed to Juko that their little stopped-up breaths, their sighing restlessness, must be the sound of the Dusty Miller, sails and torus all, falling light as a milkweed seed inward toward the sun. Then Romeo said, a closed sound only for her ear, “You see Alberto there, Juko, from where you are?”
Her eyes followed the black edge of shadow slipping smoothly clockwise, the luff of her own field casting its umbra across the Square-Away. “No. What.”
“He’s clockwise of you. On the Square-Away.”
“Sure, but he’s hid in the dark.” Looking for him, waiting for the ebb of the shadow, she said, “Al?” and then, “Hey, Al.”
She had known Alberto Poreda a long time, been a child with him in the Senlima ŝiro, been a little in love with Al once, when she was eleven. In Senlima, in that neighborhood of their childhood, the Ring River cut two shallow channels, and the footings of the Fiddle-Spoke rose straight up from the gravelly island to pierce the high ceiling. When she had been eleven, she had sat on the island in the shadow of the spoke with a boy whose name she no longer remembered, and she’d let that boy touch her flat brown nipples. She had told this to Al afterward, without knowing why she had wanted him to know, but she remembered the reddened look his face had taken on, and that he had kept away from her for weeks—maybe it was from panic. Why was she remembering that now? All this looking backward.
“Juko,” Romeo said, “he’s gone offline is all, see if you can get him to answer up, wave his hand or something.”
She made a reply, wordless, and left the center of her field for the weathermast, sculling across the open
sail without hurrying, and then coming in along the mast beginning to pull swiftly hand over hand. There was no wind, only the steady small light of the little sun, and the star field skipping a dim shine off the facets of sail. In the absence of windrush, Juko heard the beating of her own blood in her ears.
She and Al had used to sail tetherless, all bravado and foolishness when they were young, twenty, sweeping across the face of a field in long, heart-stopping glissades, imagining other sailmenders watching them must be struck with envy and respect. People who were twenty still sometimes went onto the sails without a tie. Young, stupid, reckless, Juko thought now. She knew, though, why they were doing it—remembered her own body’s voiceless yearning to belong to a larger, a less coherent pattern. She hadn’t loosed herself from a sail tether in years, she and Al both having become more careful after their children were born.
And she remembered suddenly: Where Al’s son should have had a hand there was a smooth rounded nub, very pink. She could not remember the child’s face at all, but very clearly the look of that nubbin, and the use he made of it, deft, delicate. Or she was remembering her own son Vilef, the single finger of his ill-formed hand climbing her chin.
When the mechanism of the sail drew the edge of shadow back smoothly across the Square-Away, she could see Al’s small dark shape on the shivering field of vilar, and another little beetle, it would be Aric Engirt over there on the Weather-Beater, pulling slowly out along the six-yard.
She said, “Al,” and no one answered, but then Romeo said something, not to her, and she heard several voices but not the words, and then Romeo again, the others falling silent as he spoke. He was a balding little man with a big voice. “Juko,” he said. “I guess you’d better go on in to him. Aric, you go too, eh? until you can see him? what he’s up to? One of you get an answer out of him, so we don’t worry.”
“Going,” she said—for Romeo, an answer—and then heard Al’s soft word, the echo unexpectedly in her ear, “Going.”
In the small silence afterward there rose in Juko an uneasy remembrance of Al Poreda’s dark narrow face, the line of his white teeth below the edge of his burning smile. And then in her ear the little hissing as in a closed room, as if he had put his body in the fire at last. She was struck by a preposterous fear, something to do with Al sailing tetherless across his field as they had used to in the old days, all bravado and foolishness. And now she was crossing over the long bright sail to him, dropping like a bird, a bead of rain, a stone into his open hands, when she saw the sudden stiff spreadeagle puff of his exo, and the shape he made bobbing on the tether like a New Year’s kite, bright cloth on a wire frame standing out stiff in the windless cold.
“Oh!” Aric Engirt said, in a surprised, childish voice, and Juko saw that he had checked his momentum, had hooked his legs around the rigging of the Weather-Beater. She went on a moment longer, falling toward Al, the mast passing swiftly under her in a thin blurred thread, and then she tripped the dragline with her thumb and when her body had ceased moving she felt something still moving within her, a jittery excitement in her chest.
“What,” Romeo said, steady and gentle.
“He’s breached his exo,” Aric Engirt said, still filled with astonishment.
The silence had its own quality of surprise. “He’s dead, then?” Romeo said, dumbfounded, without truly asking anyone anything. In a moment he said to someone else, not to any of them out on the sail—perhaps turning to tell the others gathering behind him there in the hub—“Alberto Poreda has got himself killed.” Juko thought she ought to say something to Aric or to Romeo on the incom, but what she felt, still felt, was that breathless flutter, and no words came.
She had bathed her mother’s body when the soul went out of it, had watched or helped other people do the same for their own family members—she wasn’t afraid of looking at someone who was dead. But the tumid body seemed not Al’s, seemed only ambiguously human. She waited, looking, from a hundred meters, and then went on slowly out to the end of Al’s tether, and in a little while Aric Engirt came on too.
Al was bobbing above an edge of field that had tangled hard in the lines. The exo had a glossy look, solid; there was a long straight rift in the left forearm of the exo, and a distended blip of Al’s arm was extruded into it, an egg-shape, taut and shiny, bruise-colored. The knife was still in the fist of his right glove. Juko fixed her eyes on his closed hand, the narrow serrated knife, and kept from looking at the clear skull of the exo, the fierce grin in the blood-swollen face.
“He’s cut through his exo,” Aric said, whispering this as if it might be a secret other people weren’t listening to.
Romeo Thorkildsen, his voice going on being surprised, said, “Oh! My dear God!” Then, becoming steady again, “Well, you’d better bring him in, eh? Aric? You and Juko bring him in.”
Aric Engirt looked to her in alarm. The soft pouches below his eyes were dark, the way Ĉejo’s had used to be when he was needing sleep or coming down feverish. Baby’s face. Something moved again in Juko: It was her jumpy heart contracting, tightening. “Yes,” she said. Then she put her hand out deliberately and took hold of Al’s big wrist. There wasn’t any feel of a limb inside an exo. The thing she had hold of had a smooth slick softness, rubbery. She opened Al’s hand and took the knife from it and folded the knife and put it away in her own tool belt. Then she took a better hold of his wrist, and the old marks of her fingers remained impressed in the exo.
Aric watched her, or he watched Al, not coming up to take hold of the other wrist. His need not to touch the body made her feel obscurely admirable. She didn’t speak to him—what would she say?—but then a few murmuring words spoke themselves, not for Aric’s sake. “It’s still Al. He’s just got himself killed, is all.”
She sculled gently, starting down along the mast, bringing Al’s body by the one arm. It twisted slightly, trailing behind her as a stubborn child twists to have a hand let go. Aric opened his mouth to let a breath in, and the air going down in his body made a little sound in her ear, a sigh. Finally he came and took a gingerly hold on the other arm. They went slowly inward, both of them, with Al Poreda carried buoyant between them.
People were waiting at the ring-yards. Without speaking, they fell in behind, a few and then a few more, until it had become a sort of cortege.
“He has that father sick and set to die,” someone said.
Someone else made a small answering sound, a sort of clucking of the tongue.
“What,” said Orval in his flat, recognizable tone. “I don’t know about that.”
“A cancer,” someone said. “He’s not old yet. Maybe he’s sixty, sixty-five.”
Juko cast around for something to say. She had learned from that dying old man, Al’s father, how to roll sweet brigadeiros in cinnamon and the zest of an orange; should she say that? She found that she had got used to the feel of the body. After a while she took a new, firmer grip, and looked down with mournful curiosity to see the old marks of her fingers where they remained imprinted on the exo.
“It was the ŝimanas, eh?” someone asked them all tenderly.
It was a sort of madness, an exquisite pain of utter and unspeakable aloneness. Their own. It was not a small thing. In Juko’s memory, perhaps a dozen people had killed themselves to end unbearable, unspeakable alienation; and when the clerk read the names of the dead at Yearly Meeting, these suicides seemed to lie at the center of all their lives, a heart of inexplicable grief. But they had all got to calling any least sadness or fear by its name. It is the ŝimanas, they said, blaming that mind-sickness for quarrels and forlornness and names cast like bottles into the void. Maybe they meant to enfeeble it, giving its name to other, slighter insanities. It was plain, though, that this question was asked in the old way, true and narrow. Has he gone crazy, then? killed himself?
Juko’s eyes sprang with tears, a short stinging that was not grief, she thought, but tiredness and an obscure fear, something to do with madness, with bad weather,
or the Plum Rains. She didn’t look at anyone.
“He maybe meant to cut the halyard,” Aric said, low and sick, a boy’s voice. “There was a big snarl. Maybe the field swung up and put him off his balance.”
It was Orval Wyho who said, “I never have tried it, but I expect you’d have to saw quite a bit to cut through an exo.” On the incom his voice had that crabbed sound, grumping.
Juko had known people to die on the sails—three, now four, in twenty years—but it was not those people she thought of. She was remembering poor Tual Mendoza, who had gone mad one day and cut his tether, had folded out his thin sailmender’s knife and carefully, neatly, sawed through the cord and kicked himself adrift. Juko had been in the tugboat that had taken him in afterward. She remembered how he had stared at them all with great child’s eyes, bewildered, terrorized, inarticulate.
At Meetings for Business, people every day were reporting the bleak particulars gathered up from the balloons, the first real details of weather and landforms, the discouraging measurements and jargon of glaciation, of vulcanism, of storms. What Juko had felt on hearing all this bad news, these bad reports, was just a failure of her imagination. Maybe she never had believed it would one day come to this—people standing on the new world. A hundred and seventy-five years. And now people standing on the land. She remembered how, in the tug, looking for Tual Mendoza in the black depths, all the grandness of the sails was shrunk to triviality: From a thousand kilometers, the Miller was a silver bead on a dark starred field.
Things began sliding around in her head, a random disconnectedness, none of it to do with death, now, none of it to do with Alberto Poreda. She was thinking of a long rattan table she had in mind to build; of asking Leo Furuso for the necessary bundles of reed; of getting some smaller works of hers finished before the big table could be started. Leo Furuso was one of those who’d made her a gift of wine, straw-colored, distilled from the skins of mandarin oranges, or mangoes—she wasn’t able to remember which, and fretted over this in a useless way. I don’t like waking alone in bed, she thought, as if in defense of herself, as if this fact was to blame for the earlier, bluesy pining for her husband. People shouldn’t expect their husband or their wife to hold up too much of the weight of their happiness.
