by Molly Gloss
Juko looked at him again. “Alfhilda’s twelve, then? She’s a good girl. She and her mother were always my favorites in that family.”
Children, when they were twelve, moved out of their parents’ home to spend their green years with other people—uncles or grandparents or the parents of friends—and Alfhilda, who was a cousin of Ĉejo’s, was as new to the house as he was. He had been fond of her, himself, when they’d both been children, but he had left the green years now, and imagined he ought to put a distance between himself and twelve-year-olds. “She leaves things where they land, never picks up,” he said.
Juko maybe wasn’t listening to his complaint about Alfhilda. “It’s a small house,” she told him, murmuring.
“It’s all right. We get along, all of us.”
She nodded. “Yes.” There was something in her face, a look; maybe she was feeling shut out.
“You get along with your household, too,” he said, without knowing how it could help her mood.
She nodded again. “Yes.” He didn’t know if she was thinking of Al Poreda.
The weight of their bodies fell off a little, going up the steep way onto the slope, but Juko went up the easeful climb slowly, looking into the darkness beneath the crowded houses. Houses were built to stand on poles, to let the air flow from below, let the heat and the damp out; the sutaĝo, the underneath, was used for a threshing floor, and chickens sometimes roosted there. Under one house some children were scratching something in the cool dirt, squatting with their sticks, whispering, and that made Ĉejo think of something he had forgotten.
He never had lived in the house his mother lived in now, but from his childhood Kristina Veberes had been an auntie to him, a third grandmother, and before his mother had moved her belongings into Kristina’s house, before she had married Kristina’s son, Ĉejo often had slept, played, visited in the two rooms of that apartment.
He remembered suddenly, there was a little low-roofed alcove in the front room that borrowed its space from under the stair of the sadaŭ, and he had played and slept in that odd little cranny with Kristina’s grandchildren, who had been as cousins to him. Ĉejo had not paid much attention to Bjoro in those days—a man his mother’s age, the father to one or two of Kristina’s grandchildren. But Bjoro’s wife had died, and Ĉejo’s brother; and his mother and father had ended their marriage. Now the alcove Ĉejo had slept in, the little cave where he had scratched his name in the floorboards, was Kristina Veberes’s sleeping place; and Ĉejo’s mother slept with Kristina’s son in a room that looked out on the incurvature of the world.
When Ĉejo led his mother up the ladder of her house, neighbors were standing there on the loĝio with Kristina. Four or five families divided up the long U of a house, and people liked to bring their handwork out of their apartments and make the common middle, the loĝio, a place for gossiping and arguing, for coming together to visit with their neighbors, and for children playing. Now they had made it a place for waiting to hear bad news.
Ĉejo’s father was there, too, a surprise. He turned and looked at Ĉejo coming up the ladder, and Kristina’s look followed his, white and stiff, and other people turned, and then they saw Juko coming behind him, and there was a loosening, a relief. One woman said, “There! Not Juko, eh?” Kristina pursed her mouth and then opened it silently.
The divorce of Ĉejo’s parents was old, the edge worn from it, and Humberto had kept up a quiet friendship with his once-wife, and with Kristina, but Ĉejo was surprised to see his father’s eyes fill with tears; he was surprised when Humberto put out his hand and touched the crown of Kristina’s head, stroking the old woman’s hair, and she put her hand up, too, and patted his fingers.
In a moment she said, “Who is dead then?” and Juko said quietly, “Al Poreda. It is Al Poreda.”
The people who knew Al began to shake their heads, to make small sounds of regret. Some people cried. Ĉejo cried a little himself, a guilty sorrow: He was glad it was Al who had died, and not his mother. Kristina put her hand out and drew him in, wiped his eyes on her shirtsleeve. “Well, I’m sorry for his family,” she said flatly. “But I didn’t want it to be my daughter-in-law.”
Someone said mournfully to Juko, “It was the ŝimanas, eh?” and she looked away in irritation, not answering. Then she went into the little apartment, leaving her neighbors and her family standing out in the loĝio. Ĉejo went in too, feeling still a helpless wish to comfort her. Humberto and Kristina went on standing out there a little longer, speaking together in a murmur Ĉejo couldn’t hear, but finally they came in too, and Kristina slid the wall closed to keep out the neighbors.
Juko had filled a kettle for tea and plugged it in, had begun to measure the leaves. Kristina unfolded a repozo but she wouldn’t sit against it herself; she brought out little cups for each of them and sat down with hers in the middle of the rug. Then Juko left the tea kettle unfinished and sat down against the unused repozo, her legs folded under her. She let her head fall back against the wicker rest and shut her eyes. Ĉejo sat too. It was Humberto who went to stand in the corner of the room, the little galley, to wait for the kettle to get done with heating itself.
The daylight through the open casement was yellowish, warm, stirred by a small draft. Ĉejo closed his eyes as his mother had done. A brief dark dream was imprinted behind his eyelids: Al Poreda’s broad brown face swelling suddenly and blackening, eyes widening to let fear swiftly out, and his mother’s face contracting, taking the fear in through her open mouth, the holes of her eyes.
“I should go and see Ina,” Juko said, in a tired, flat voice. Probably she was waiting for someone to forgive her for not going. Ĉejo looked at her.
“Her family and her neighbors will be there,” Kristina said. “You don’t have to go right now.”
Juko made a small, indeterminate sound. In a moment, Humberto brought the pot of fragrant tea. When he was pouring for Ĉejo he lifted his brows in a vaguely questioning way, nothing to do with the tea. Maybe, like the others, he was asking, Was it the ŝimanas then? Ĉejo shrugged his shoulders. He only half remembered the last time there had been an accident on the sail: A woman named Ĵulia? Ĵunio? had suffered an embolism, something to do with her air mix, a faulty exo. He remembered someone’s words, “Choked for breath,” but then he realized: He didn’t know if these words had to do with Julia, or if they had been spoken to explain the death of his brother, Vilef.
Juko and Kristina began to talk quietly about Al’s wife and son, Juko telling and Kristina asking tedious particulars to do with that family, and both of them relating anecdotes about Al’s distant relatives, people Ĉejo didn’t know. They went on with it for a while and then fell silent. Ĉejo sipped his tea, looking down in the little cup. All at once he began to hear the slight, distant rush of the Falls From Grace, and then in other apartments two women talking, and the scraping of a table leg or a cane against the floor, and children calling to one another, and chickens fighting, and birds vocalizing in a multitude of languages.
He had recognized in himself, for a long time now, a deeply morbid curiosity to do with the rare violent deaths, and gradually it became too difficult not to ask his mother: “Will you say how Al was killed?”
She looked at the vertical poles of the wall, or through the casement to the dry crown of a tree framed there. Ĉejo looked too. Above the lineaments of the tree, he glimpsed a delicate cluster of xenon lights in the arching scaffold of the ceiling. “Maybe he was looking for the Ruby,” she said, sighing. “We all were, I think, but maybe it was too far off for him, eh?”
In a moment Ĉejo said, “Yes,” though she may not have meant to ask anyone anything. She had brought him out on the sails once, pulling along the hawser from the hub of the torus to the one yard, and then out the gallantmast the long distance toward the masthead. They had seemed to float on the vast array of sheets, rocking, below an infinite field of wheeling stars. His mother had warned him: “Don’t look at the stars,” but how could he not? He had vomited
inside the exo, sailsick, and they had had to turn back at the three-yard without reaching the head of the mast. All the way back, he had kept staring out at the dizzying turn of the starfield, and the undulating, unimaginably distant horizon of the sail. It was too far off. He thought he knew what that meant.
“There was a cut in his exo,” she said after a moment. She said it in such a way, tiredly, that Ĉejo felt a quick waxing of his guilt. But at a certain age—eleven, twelve—he had liked to imagine the effect of vacuum on the human body. He had not thought, then, that the swelling corpse maybe would seal a hole in an exo. He used to imagine a body freely dilating to the point of dispersal of the atoms, keeping a human shape with infinitely widening interstices until, like the universe, its form became too vast to perceive.
“He cut it himself,” Juko said, and Ĉejo found a brief, terrible appeal in imagining Al Poreda cutting at his exo, trying to let his shape out upon the stars. After a brief silence, low-voiced, she said, “But maybe it wasn’t meant. He might have slipped, cutting the tangle out of a halyard.”
Kristina Veberes made a small, chaffing sound, shuh. Ĉejo saw the look that went between his mother and her mother-in-law. Kristina and Juko’s friendship was old, they got along with few words. This was something to do with Al’s death, but he was excluded from its meaning.
“Do you remember Karlina Remlinger?” Humberto said. He had been silent until now. Ĉejo looked at him, but he had been asking Juko. She rolled her head slightly against the head of the repozo.
“You know her. She repairs electrical things. She carries around her tools in that high-sided red cart with the rope handles.” He waited for Juko’s face to tell him she remembered. Then he said, “She has a theory to do with persons whose ancestry is equatorial, being more prone to ŝimanas than other people. She thinks racial memory or something, a tolerance of artificial daylight, is on the side of the Norse line, the English.” Ĉejo saw him glance sideward at Juko. “She’s doing a compiling. Maybe she’ll ask people about Al’s family line, and whether he is from Costa Rican people. If it was the ŝimanas killed him.”
Juko moved restlessly. She set her tea on the boards of the floor, pulled her feet up under her and sat on her toes, sideways. “Where does this theory come from, eh? She might be wrong about this, about a racial tolerance. People who lived in those winter-lands, they were known for unhappiness, I thought.” But then she said unhappily, “He’s Costa Rican, I think. His father, Armando, is dark, anyway, his name is Poreda. I don’t remember Al’s mother. Do you know her family?” She looked at Kristina.
Kristina’s old face gathered. “Linda Florencio,” she said. She made that abrading sound again, shuh, and looked at each of them. Her hair was white and long; she habitually pulled it back and tied it with a bright piece of yarn or a ribbon, but it was coarse, frizzy, the unruly ends stuck out in a halo. “There’s been endless intermarrying, eh? There can’t be many families who are mostly of one line, do you think? Anyway, hardly any records are kept. Do you know Armando’s parents, or Linda’s? How can Karlina know they weren’t Norse, eh? or English?”
“She has found some old disks,” Humberto said. “They kept better records early on, I heard. She asks the old people, makes family trees. I don’t know how many families she has found that are mostly one ancestry.” He had a habit of smiling crookedly while squeezing his brows up high above the bridge of his nose: a quizzical look, unconfident. He was prone to use it when he thought he’d be disputed. It had a childishness that vaguely irritated Ĉejo. For a couple of years, he had been watching himself for that look, in case it might be inherited. Now, when his father made that face, Ĉejo studied him. He had straight black hair, long eyes, slightly folded lids, though his family name was Norwegian. Juko was Juko Ohaŝi, though he thought there was less Japanese in her family than in Humberto Indergard’s—her hair was brown and fine, her eyes were blue. Ĉejo usually didn’t see his father’s face in mirrors; he was more than half serious about that. Only sometimes, unexpectedly, he glimpsed Humberto’s long eyes looking back on him from the glass. He had not thought of them as Japanese eyes until now.
“Why’s she doing it?” he asked his father. “Nothing’s to be done, only we’d worry about everybody we knew who was Costa Rican, and they’d worry about themselves.”
Humberto said, “Well, we’re worrying anyway, I guess. It might not hurt to know who we should worry about.” He still kept his little smiling frown.
Ĉejo shook his head, unpersuaded. “I think it would just push them over the edge, anybody who was leaning that way.” He felt a sudden indisputable certainty. “If I was prone to ŝimanas, I wouldn’t want to know.”
Humberto shrugged softly. “Some people would want to know. How can some know and some not?”
Ĉejo was impatient with this reasoning but not able quickly to rebut it. He was a slow thinker, he felt; he would realize his answer tonight or tomorrow, too late.
“Maybe Karlina is thinking about the long run,” Juko said. “She might be thinking to keep equatorial peoples from parenting with each other.”
“People should marry whomever they choose,” Ĉejo said fiercely. He made ready to argue this conviction if his mother took the usual view. Families and neighbors liked to arrange marriages, but he had lately fallen in love for what he felt sure would be the last time, and his feelings ran high on the subject. A small look passed between his parents but there was no telling what it meant, whether it was something to do with him, or with their own marriage, the finish of it, or the beginning.
“No one would stop anyone from marrying,” Humberto said. “But people would know, if this theory of Karlina’s is true, that a person who was Costa Rican should try to marry someone from another line, a northern line. If you were looking for a good husband or a wife for someone in your family, you wouldn’t suggest that a Costa Rican marry another Costa Rican. It would just become a known thing.”
Ĉejo said nothing. He didn’t know why he felt boxed off, defeated. It hadn’t been an argument. Helplessly, he began to worry whether this girl he loved, Katrin Amundsen, might be equatorial.
The others were silent as well. It had begun to be dusk, and in the lowered light they sat on the floor without touching, without looking at one another. Humberto still held the little cup of tea in the hollow of his hand, and he looked into it. Juko, with her head pressed against the repozo, watched the slow darkening of the ceiling, the rafters that were the floor of the sadaŭ.
“What can be grown in that cold,” she said after a while. She said it flatly, not a question.
Humberto looked at her with his brows squeezed up, that quizzical look. “There is some native flora,” he said. “Woody plants, mosses, lichens, small trees in the stream valleys.”
“Can you grow kiwi fruit? Ĉejote?” she asked him irritably. “What will you eat? The woody plants? The mosses?”
In the next year they must settle on a way of going. They must swing around the sun to get up speed for leaving—for going on fifty years to the next likely world—or iris the sail and make an anchorage around this one—settle on this world now and forever. Ĉejo felt a thrill of fear, that his mother might have made up her mind already, on a question that was so momentous.
Humberto drank down the little bit of cold tea and examined the inside of the cup. “Nils Truhijo and many others are drafting designs for plantodomo. There is a library of frozen agricultural cells; people are looking for species suited to a tundra. Or there may be more temperate zones—where the balloons failed, eh? in the southwestern islands, the eastern midlatitudes.” He glanced toward Juko, perhaps gauging the quality of her discouragement. “For twenty years we’ve known there was not much hope of a mesothermal climate,” he said, watching her.
Ĉejo looked at Juko too. “You haven’t made up your mind, have you? How can you find the sense of a Meeting if your mind is made up?”
Juko shook her head angrily. “No. My mind isn’t made up. I only want to be
gloomy today. Let me cry over my ĉejote and kiwis, and tomorrow you can tell me about greenhouses and temperate zones.” Suddenly she did cry a little, putting her fist to her cheek, and a few tears ran down the path between her curled fingers. Ĉejo stared at her in surprise. He could not remember when he had seen his mother cry. Not even on the occasion of his brother’s death.
Humberto looked at her too. “There are some hardy kiwis, I think,” he said in astonishment. “But you can cry for the ĉejote.”
Kristina, without speaking of Juko’s tears, stood suddenly and picked up people’s cups from the floor. “I have some tortillas. I’ll find something to put in them. Ĉejo, maybe you would come and slice things.”
She put on the little light in the galley and brought things out of the cold box: bits of pepper and mushroom and steamed rice left from another meal, cilantro, peanuts, sprouts of lemongrass. On the narrow pocket table, Ĉejo cut the peanuts and the cilantro with a knife. The tortillas were dark, Kristina liked to make them from breadnut; she built upon them slowly, arraying the food on the flat rounds, while Humberto and Juko went on talking quietly, asking and answering things to do with Juko’s now-husband, Bjoro, and the go-down boat, the Lark.
“She was crying for Al Poreda,” Ĉejo whispered to Kristina when he had thought it through.
She didn’t look up from what she was doing. “I don’t know,” she said. There was a distant quality in the sound of her voice, and Ĉejo felt suddenly excluded from something. He was afraid, while they all had been sitting together drinking orange-scented tea and speaking of tundra plants and closed minds, the others had experienced a different conversation.
They sat around the low table and Kristina, with a look, encouraged them all in a brief, religious silence: gratitude for the meal. Then while they ate, they talked of the health of several people they knew, and slightly sordid hearsay about a woman who was an old enemy of Kristina’s, and gossip about Humberto’s cousin’s daughter who was marrying a man none of them knew. When the table was cleared they might, on another night, have played Obsession, or got out the chess board—it was rare for Ĉejo to have his mother and father in one place, under one roof. But there was Al Poreda, and the cold tundra planet, and his mother’s mood was dark. He kissed Kristina’s dry cheek and Juko’s, and received their kisses, while Humberto stood watching, shifting his feet. Then he and his father walked home from Pacema in the darkness.
