by Molly Gloss
The torus gradually took on size and effect. It had a quick gravitational turning, and at its circumference it lapped the slower diaphane of sails with a tireless constancy. From the one-yard, the periphery of the torus rose from the horizon in a long, lustrous, reeling palisade, with the globe-shaped hub at the axis seeming to stand unmoving behind it like the inner keep of a castle. A small confusion of cupolas and knobby spires projected north and south from the hub, and these poles spun swift or slow or not at all, according to their uses. People climbed out to the sails or back from them along the cat’s cradle of lines between the one-yard of the diaphane and the docking ports at the north pole. It was the usual thing to trip a dragline and leap over the thwarts of the torus in one long splendid planing: In that one moment, the gray fastness of the wheel became the nucleus about which and for which those two hundred fields of silver-gilt sail were spread. But now, having Al Poreda’s swollen body in their hands, they climbed the hawser with deliberateness, with gravity; and the torus, revealing itself incrementally beneath them, seemed unrevealed, flat, jejune.
There were long apertures chasing the inner circumference of the wheel. The apertures had been baffled against the dizzying turn of the starfield—there was no seeing in or out of them. There had been mirrors once, corresponding to the apertures, for letting the light of the old sun into the world, but they had been disassembled early on and the mirrors sold off, and it had been a myriad of xenon fixtures that had brought them ersatz daylight in the long years between suns. There was a spangle of lights at the hub, in the few small windows and defining the docking ports, but the wheel and its spokes were dark, windowless, arcane. Juko, looking down on it through the architecture of Al Poreda’s stiff, spreadeagled legs, felt bitterly its lack of a human reference.
She thought all at once, inexplicably, of the big, yellowing camphor tree standing on the high side of her house. The altejo aqueduct ran in a narrow channel up there, but where the roots of the old tree shouldered it to one side, the water spread out shallow and slow. It was a favored place for birds to come, drinking and bathing, though the water was brown and there were bits of twig and dead leaves in it. The camphor tree was inborn, but old for all that, a crown ten meters high, shedding leaves now in great dry drifts, the limbs displaying themselves against the ceiling. People in the ŝiro had had the young forester to look at the sick old tree, but it occurred to Juko now: The camphor might be dead before her husband had gotten home again. He’d be four days, five, surveying on the ground, then thirty days sailing back here in the Ruby—at least that. Al Poreda is dead, she thought, as if that ought to keep the death of the camphor tree from surprising her.
2
Ĉejo
To think that the sun rose in the east—that men and women were flexible, real, alive—that everything was alive,
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our part,
To think that we are now here and bear our part.
IN THE LIFT, Ĉejo stood with a woman who was mournful and silent—he thought he remembered she was a relative of Al Poreda’s. He didn’t know if he should speak to the woman—he was in an agony of fear—but finally he said, “Are you Ina’s sister?” She was fair-skinned, narrow-eyed like Al’s wife, Ina; they had the same stoopy shoulders on a long torso.
The woman’s face was red in a blotchy way, but if she’d been weeping she was done with it for now. She nodded gravely. “You’re Humberto Indergard’s son. You look his image. Your mother works the sail with Alberto. Is she Juko Ohaŝi?”
“Yes.”
She nodded again. “Do you know about Al? He got killed just now. I’m sent to meet the body.”
The bad news, which had been vague, became at once more specific. He felt a quick, excruciating relief: Alberto Poreda.
One of Ĉejo’s cousins had spent his green years with Al and his wife. Ĉejo had used to spend a little time there too, with his cousin, when he had been nine, ten. He had gotten from Al and Ina a short-lived, very fierce interest in Jesus Christ. But when the word had come round the neighborhood, someone on the sail was killed, his heart had turned over; he had thought it was his mother.
Ĉejo and Al Poreda’s sister-in-law came gradually buoyant in the lift, turning round to new positions relative to the floor, the door. The exit opened in what had been the ceiling. At the egress of the lift there was a corridor yoked to other corridors looping out to the docks and into the warren of labs and manufactory. Ĉejo didn’t know the way. He followed the sister-in-law, who went ahead of him slowly in a long, drifting stride. It was cold in the hub. He rolled down the sleeves of his shirt.
Against the bright-green field of the curving wall were mahogany-colored people, yellow lions, stilt-legged white birds, all dancing long-limbed with their teeth bared, their feet turned out; then he passed a row of peak-roofed brick houses standing with shoulders adjoining, women sitting in bunches on the steps before the cherry-red doors; and a person in yellow trousers walking along a dry road beside a tile-and-plaster wall, beside trees arrayed high-crowned against a vivid blue firmament. On the long, windowless passageways of the hub, without an orientation to ceiling, to floor, people had painted a kaleidoscope of murals. Ĉejo had painted here, himself, two or three times. There were thousands of meters of intersecting corridors, no lack of surfaces. People had been painting on these walls since the beginning of life in the Miller and the murals beside the lifts were very old—maybe they were the work of people who had been dead for a hundred years.
When he and the sister-in-law came out to the periphery of the north pole, windows were set at rare intervals, letting on the docking ports. The ports had been meant to receive the big heavy-lift vehicles that had used to come up from Earth launches. They were used now chiefly by individual sailmenders entering and leaving the hub, for which use they seemed cavernous, out of scale. There were strands of lights framing each of the portals, a frame for wheeling stars, but within them was blackness, hugeness. In one, finally, Ĉejo saw a lit torch and shapes drifting inward seeking the human-scale hatch in the deep darkness of the interior wall. Their shadows fell away long and utterly black in several directions at once, jumping up the walls, the ceiling, down to the floor, in the great cave of the docking port. He put his face to the glass, looking for his mother.
“Is that Al they’re bringing in there?” the sister-in-law asked him, coming to look also. There was no telling yet. He saw tiny shapes, five or six, in the bright white of exos.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But it must have been. When they followed the curve of the corridor, they saw other people had got there ahead of them, crowding the space in front of the hatch. Ĉejo knew most of them, by face at least; they worked the sailchart room or the sail, were friends of his mother and of Al. Some he didn’t know. One was dark like Al, an old man, his skin close to his bones. The sister-in-law didn’t speak to the old man but took hold of his arm as she came alongside him.
Ĉejo thought he should wait out of the way, at the edge of the group. Someone he knew, a sailcharter named Anĝelo Jutaka, held a wall strap away from the others. When he was next to him, Ĉejo said, “Do you remember me? I’m Juko’s son.”
Anĝelo nodded without smiling. “You’re grown up. I remember you, a little child. Did you hear about Al Poreda?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Juko who’s bringing in his body.”
Ĉejo looked toward the door. There was a small round window set in it, letting on the pressure chamber. From where he was, he could see nothing through the glass. He waited, imagining his mother and the others crowded into the little room with Al Poreda’s body, their white exos bumping silently together in the whispering room.
“They’ve let the Lark down, did you hear?” Anĝelo Jutaka leaned closer to him, speaking the words softly next to his ear, a solemn whisper. “Nobody should be surprised if it was the ŝimanas killed Al—it’s the anxiousness does it, that’s my feeling, and these a
re anxious times, no denying.”
Ĉejo didn’t know what he should say to that. He had been wild with restlessness earlier in the day, feeling on the cusp of great change. Now his anxiousness had an immediacy he didn’t think Anĝelo was meaning—he wanted his mother to come out of the hatch. He wanted to see her face, let her see his.
“Isn’t that Ina’s sister?” Anĝelo asked him, murmuring into his ear. “Isn’t her name Ajlina?” He bent his head toward the sister-in-law.
Ĉejo had not remembered the woman’s name until now. “Yes. She’s come to meet the body.”
“Well I don’t know him, but I guess the other, the old man, must be from Al’s family too. He looks like Al, eh? Dark and short like that.”
The hatch door released a little breath and then swung slowly inward so the people next to it had to move out of the way, some of them pressing their backs against an old wall painting: the graying spines of books in untidy rows and stacks among oddments and keepsakes. It was Orval Wyho who had opened the hatch, but he didn’t come all the way out of the chamber. He unfastened the skull of his exo and drifted to one side, bareheaded, solemn, waiting for the body to be taken ahead of him into the corridor. Ĉejo’s mother and a man named Aric Engirt guided Al by the elbows as if he were a child or an old man with frail legs, but the shape in the exo was unliving, sufflated, the image behind the clear faceplate tumid and black.
The old man of Al’s family slid his look gently over Al’s poor face, shook his head, said “Ah, ah” in a sorrowful way. The woman, Ajlina, when she saw Al, expelled her breath in a sound loud and clipped as a bark. “Oh! God! Who can believe this?” She began a harsh moan, and the old man embraced her, his own lament become a condolence, “Ah, ah, ah.” Ĉejo could see it was a pantomime of grief for his mother: She and Aric, while they went on holding Al’s wrists, his puffy elbows, were shut inside their hardhats, not able to get out of them one-handed. People came together around the body, supporting the father, the sister-in-law, and in the narrow, crowded space Ĉejo lost his view of Juko. She had not seen him, hadn’t looked toward him.
It was Ajlina, suddenly, who gave up her hold on the old man and took Al’s hands deliberately in her own. Her face was stiff, tearless, she was abruptly finished with her outcry. “They have got a bier waiting at the foot of Esperplena, eh?” She said this to no one specifically, but looking around at them all hopefully. Then she gave over one of Al’s hands to the old man, who touched it to his lips and said “Gift of God” in a trembling voice. The two of them led some of the other people in a little procession down the corridor. They were tenderly guiding Al’s buoyant corpse between them, as if he were a blind man.
Then Ĉejo could see his mother. She had at last unfastened her headpiece and was holding it in the crook of one arm like a parcel. Her face was pale, mournful, her hair sticking up in a ridge along the crown of her head. When she saw him, she grimaced silently. She said something to Aric Engirt, a few low words, and spoke to others as she made a way through them slowly to where Ĉejo waited with Anĝelo Jutaka. “I guess it was the ŝimanas, eh?” people said to her anxiously, and she shrugged a shoulder.
“Juko,” Anĝelo said.
She touched Ĉejo’s arm lightly, but she looked at Anĝelo, said to him, “What did Romeo hear, do you know, Anĝelo?”
Anĝelo looked away. “I guess he said a word, ‘going,’ or something like that. That’s all Romeo heard.”
She shook her head. “Before that, eh? What made Romeo think there was trouble?”
Anĝelo shrugged. “Just a little sound is all. Maybe it was the air going out the hole, or the knife against the exo, sawing. He hears everything, Romeo does.” He looked at her. “Al never said anything to him, if that’s what you were meaning.”
“I guess it was.”
“No, he never said anything.” He shook his head. “He never said a word. Not on the incom, anyway. It was the ŝimanas, eh?”
Juko grimaced, lifting her shoulder again.
“Do you have to log out?” Ĉejo asked her.
She squeezed his hand. “Yes. You don’t need to come. Will you wait for me?”
“Don’t get started talking to people.” He wanted Anĝelo Jutaka, hearing him say it, to help her go in and out quickly from the sailchart room.
“I won’t. A little while. Wait for me.”
She and Anĝelo and other sailmenders went off without him and he found the long, complicated way around to the gallery of the spokes. He waited. When she finally came, she was free of the exo, wore an undyed flaxen shirt and the kenaf trousers she favored, the ones dyed red. He liked the trousers himself, but not the shirt: The yellow at her throat made her skin look sallow.
She made a face, screwing up her mouth again. “People wanted to talk.”
“It’s okay,” he said. In the hub of the Miller the fluorescent lights were garish, equivocal. He had waited alone, in the cold lights, the cold air. What time was it? You had to go outward to find the day, the night.
They held on to the wall silently, waiting for the lift, their bodies insistently adrift. After a while she said, complaining, “I’m tired, I want to sit. There’s no sitting up here.”
He said, “No.”
She looked toward him. Then she put her arm out, reaching for him, and let her head rest against his ear. Ĉejo’s eyes sprang unexpectedly with tears. “I thought it was you,” he said, his voice breaking helplessly, and she made a sound of distress, wordless, without lifting her head.
They went down from the hub silently, heavily, in the lift of the eightspoke. People liked to name every mechanical thing, and they had named this spoke the Way-Around: At its foot on the east side, the Ring River completed its circling of the world and went under the ground, where a pump lifted the river to its beginning again on the spoke’s west side, and released it in the short steep cataract of the Falls From Grace. When Ĉejo and his mother came out from the lift into the high, upcurving vault of the torus—out into the damp heat and yellowish light of afternoon—the clamor of the falls was a sudden steady noise, obscurely comforting.
The earth in the Miller was impounded on the slopes—terraces and steps that followed the long curving geometry of the torus. People in his mother’s ŝiro, the Pacema, lived on the high banks, the altejo, their houses built along the curve of the walls, near the bones of the ceiling. In the rainy season, Pacema houses stood above the fog, looking out through the tops of trees to houses and fields on the other side of the short arc, sixty-five meters across, or down the long, narrow, embowed vista to the houses of Bonveno ŝiro, westward, or the footings of the sevenspoke, the Violin String, which stood at the top of the rise to the east.
People in the terraced fields were weeding the flax or tying up the seed pods of onions with little sacks to catch the seeds as they dried and dropped off, but as Ĉejo and Juko went by them on the little path between the river and the maltejo fields, they stood up from their work and spoke to Juko anxiously, wanting to know if it was true that someone on the sail had been killed, or wanting to know who was dead, or asking if it was the ŝimanas that had killed him. Ĉejo’s mother nodded or shrugged, answering people impatiently without speaking, walking with her hands pushed down in the pockets of her red pants. Ĉejo wanted to say something to console her, but didn’t know what it ought to be.
“I came up in the lift with Al’s sister-in-law,” he said uselessly.
His mother, with her eyes fixed on her sandals, said, “Do you know Armando? The old man who was there with Ajlina? I think you met him once at Yearly Meeting.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Well, it was a long time ago.” Then she told him, “Al is the old man’s son.”
“I can see it. They have the same look,” Ĉejo said.
“I guess they do. People say that, anyway.” She looked at Ĉejo. “People say you look like Humberto.”
This was something he always had refused. From habit, he made a grimacing face. “I don’t look like him. I don�
��t know why people always say that.”
In a moment, another old habit, she said to him, “You’re prettier,” and gave him a sliding look, a little smile. She brought one hand out of her pocket and reached for his. They walked up the footway between the fields, their clasp of hands connecting them.
People trained vines to go up the posts of arbors but often kiwi and ĉejote had a habit of ranging out, unruly; in Alaŭdo fields, where Ĉejo lived and farmed with his father, he had been tying up the blind vines, helping them find the poles. No one in Pacema was doing this, or they had fallen behind in the work. Where ĉejote had come snaking out in the path, Ĉejo stooped and pushed back the tender stems. He felt his mother watching him. She was still getting over her surprise at seeing him a farmer. Her look made him feel proprietary, adult.
“Are you solidly moved in?” she asked him.
He had only lately come back to live with Humberto. He had spent his green years in his mother’s brother’s household in Senlima, but when he had made up his mind to farm, he’d come back to his father’s house.
“Yes. I’m in. We’ve got the loom moved, that was the worst thing. Four of us carried it.”
“Who all is in that apartment now?”
“Leona and Petro”—these were his father’s parents, Ĉejo’s grandparents—“and Heza Barfor.” When Juko looked toward him, he added, “She’s a divorced woman without children. She was living in her sister-in-law’s house but they didn’t get along. Alfhilda, too, she’s living with us now.”
