by Molly Gloss
Now Humberto went alone between the ranks of green, skinning the ground with the blade of the maĉeta in short, even strokes. His son had gone to work with Ĝeronimo Zea, digging up and chopping the spent stalks of okra now that that crop was finished, and Humberto had gone into the rice without asking anyone else’s company in his work. He thought he wanted to be alone, and not to talk to anyone about the crashed boat. Weeding was not a job he liked overmuch, but he liked the small, repetitive sound, the scuffing the blade made against the earth, and when he straightened his back and glanced behind him, he liked the way the row looked, the soil clean and dark, and the cut weeds lying in little wilting windrows. It was work you could do without thinking about anything, your mind absorbed in the short, methodical swinging of the tool.
Houses stood nearby the field of rice, and the path between Alaŭdo and Esperplena went along the south edge of the Shepherd’s Crook; people frequently walked by on the path or went up the ladder of a house or down from one. He kept at his work with his head down, meaning to give a message about his wish for solitude, but not many people respected it. Because he was related to actors in the event, they steadily brought him their well-meant sympathy and their speculations about the Lark.
Years before, Luza Kordoba had stopped his bleeding to death when he had stepped into the edge of Henriko Lij’s cane-cutter. And though he and Luza had never had a sexual union—Luza was sapphic, her lovers all had been women—people knew that Humberto had loved her for a while, and tried to interest her in loving him, and that their friendship was charged with an old sexual energy. They wanted to bring him consoling words—he must be suffering grief for Juko’s sake, eh? and for the loss of Luza Cordoba—but he was already tired of the weight of his sorrow. He wanted to find peace in his weeding and be allowed to let go of the people lost on the New World.
After a while Pia Putala walked out into the rice with another long blade and went to work beside him. She was silent for quite a while, as if she must have guessed his wish for privacy. But then she said, looking around, “There is a word just gone around from the Radio Committee, a rescue is being done. Did you hear?”
He hadn’t heard that. He stood up straight. “No. They’re not killed, then?”
“Well, maybe not, somebody among them has given a kind of signal. I guess it was a plan they all made in case this might happen. They’ve got a balloon going to bring them up one by one, people are saying.”
Humberto stood looking across the several rows of rice at Pia. Since word had come of the crash of the Lark, he had secretly thought they were dead, all four of them, or would be shortly, as there wasn’t any way to get them back up to the Ruby, was there? He hadn’t imagined they could use the balloons. The idea startled him, made him feel stupid.
“When?” he asked her.
She straightened from her work and looked thoughtfully at the ground. “I don’t think there was a time said. A balloon isn’t something you can move precisely, I guess. But anyway they’ve started on it.” She eyed him cautiously. “There’s no sure telling this rescue will work, I don’t suppose.”
He was surprised again, feeling there must have been something in his face or his voice that made this woman, twenty years younger, think him so naive. “No,” he said, in a tone of astonishment, and bent to his weeding again. He wondered if people had gone to tell this news to Juko and to Kristina Veberes, but was afraid of asking it, embarrassed.
He had thought there was only one possibility and now suddenly there were several. He kept on with the maĉeta, but his peace was now completely lost, he was preoccupied with imagining the manifold details and difficulties of this balloon rescuing. Deliberately, he kept from reimagining Luza and Bjoro alive. He was cautious of pouring much hope into a fragile vessel.
Once she had told her news, Pia became silent again, focused upon the repetitive weeding, and after a while Humberto surprised himself by restarting their conversation. He asked her, “Are people wanting to go on with Meeting for Business, have you heard?” He didn’t want to go to the Farms Committee Meeting if people only meant to stand around and guess at how things would come out with the crashed boat.
“I don’t know,” Pia said. “I heard a clerk over in Bonveno saying, how could people come together on ordinary business matters until the Lark was a settled trouble? But he doesn’t farm. I don’t know what other people, farming people, are thinking. Maybe they wouldn’t want to put it off. Nothing is ordinary these days, eh? There’s a lot of studying and weighing of things that still needs to be done.”
They had been studying and weighing for years, but now there was accurate information, useful detail. The more known, the more is known to ask, was an old maxim lately become timely. “The answer to every question is ten new questions,” Humberto said unhappily, and Pia nodded without speaking.
He straightened, pushing a little stiffness out of his back, and looked across the field of rice into the woodland. For a while he had been hearing a ringing high whistle—a nunbird, he thought it was, objecting to their voices. He looked on the long slope at the edge of the woods, in the patchy, concealing shade under the trees, the ferns, for the bird’s low nest. He had once been privileged to see the mouth of a white-fronted nunbird’s nest, an inconspicuous hole a few centimeters wide with a long anteroom of twigs and dead leaves hiding it. It was Ridaro Rogelio who had shown it to him a lifetime ago, when he was still green and had thought he might want to take up Ridaro’s work, be an ornithologist. For a while he had followed Ridaro at his slow, painstaking practice of netting and banding and counting and releasing certain birds, and then netting and killing others. When the cats had taken a plague and died, people had found they must act as keystone predators of some species, and this killing was part of Ridaro’s work. Humberto never had been able to get a distance between himself and the killing and he’d lost his eagerness for ornithology. But he never had stopped watching birds.
“Are you doing a committee job?” Pia asked him.
He nodded without taking his gaze from the edge of the woodland. There had not yet been agreement on the question of whether new species, Earth species, ought to be introduced to the New World. People researching this question had brought up plagues of alien rabbits in Australia, of alien cheatgrass in North America; but evidently there had once been a landmass connecting America with Asia, and animals had crossed in both directions, some killing off others—how was this natural event different from human ones? While they waited for agreement, quite a few people were going ahead, looking at the Miller’s library of frozen cells for plants that would take cold weather, poor soils. Humberto’s little committee studied the wild things—cold-tolerant natives that might, if cultivated, be edible, or pharmacological, or useful as a textile.
“I’m put to studying subarctic natives, the xerophyla,” he said to Pia. “It isn’t known yet, but if the water in the soil is frozen, a tundra, then when it thaws there will be too much water, the roots will stand in it.”
She grimaced. “All these bad accounts.”
Humberto lowered his eyes to the earth, his dirty feet, the toe strap of his worn sandals. “Some things will grow in those circumstances. I’m reading, looking.” He began slowly to weed again. By the time he thought of saying something about esculant willows, the moment for it seemed to have slid by.
Pia let her maĉeta rest on the ground but she didn’t straighten. She looked toward Humberto diffidently from her hunched-over pose above the handle of the long knife. “You have relatives on that boat, eh? Someone said you had a lover, or a brother, on the Lark.”
Humberto shook his head, his face flushing. “I know Luza Kordoba, but not in that way. My son’s mother is now Bjoro Andersen’s wife.” Pia’s wrong information humbled him. He realized with embarrassment, maybe his links to the crashed boat had made him feel speciously self-important.
Pia said, circling backward a bit, “I guess I’d find it hard to keep a clear mind for a Business Meeting, myse
lf, with the Lark still unsettled.”
He seldom spoke in Meetings. He thought the clarity of his mind maybe wasn’t the issue. “Whatever other people want to do,” he said, straightening again so he could shrug.
Pia had two young children at home, one was a baby still sometimes nursing at her breast. Around the midday her nephew carried the crying baby out to the rice field to see if Pia’s breast was what the baby wanted, and after that Pia quit the field. Humberto worked on alone until the weeding of Shepherd’s Crook got done, then he went down to the tools house and washed and honed the maĉeta he had used, and rubbed a little oil onto the metal, and hung it up by the handle on a hook. He was tired, his back ached, his skin itched with sweat, but he had not altogether lost his wish for solitude, and this was a time of day when there would be several people in the baths. So he went up the ladder of the domaro to his own apartment.
There was only Alfhilda there, heating a soup. Humberto brought out the old books and the tapes he had from the borrowing library and sat on the wide sill of the casement with his back braced against the frame in the pasado wall and his knees pulled up to rest a librajo there. Humberto had lately begun a hunt for relatives of the tough, adaptive willows and birches whose stunted forms had once made a rug across the northern plains of the Earth. The possibilities he listed went to Kilian Bejrd, who studied each of them for their dietetic values, digestibility, or to Andreo Rodiba who was an herbalist, or to Edmo Smith, a spinster and weaver. And then to Anejlisa Revfiem who was tinkering with hybridizing different ones to see if they could be recast in a more useful or a more productive form. It was slow work—after a year of this studying and tinkering, they had two dozen possibilities that might furnish a marginal crop, might nourish or clothe or heal a person in need. But Humberto liked the difficult progress. He thought there was a certain satisfaction in untangling a small tight knot in a piece of thread—maybe more than in straightening out a big kinked rope.
He read the botanical works on the screen of the librajo with his eyes pinched to force the intricate old languages, the unwieldy namings, through a narrow strait. When his eyes or his mind tired, then he set the botanicals down and read old, general geographies about tundra soils, subarctic climes, their language of landscape by now comfortingly familiar. Much in those books was reiterative, but he wasn’t tired of them. He had caught from some of the essays a kind of reverence for the strategies animals and plants had used, surviving in an arduous climate.
Alfhilda brought him soup and sat on the floor with her own bowl in her lap. She was his brother Pero’s only child, a girl with a broad brown face, unreticent, impulsive, a songbird. She had a potter’s wheel in the Alaŭdo work shed, and frequently went about with clayed hands, had to be reminded to wash. Her ceramics were plain and artless—her gift was for biology, and lately she had apprenticed herself to Anejlisa Revfiem. She liked to read from Humberto’s botanical books, and talk seriously with him about the genetics of draba mustards and tundra grass and stunted mountain heather. He had had a quiet life for several years in a small household, himself and two old people. Now his brother’s daughter and his own son had moved into this apartment, along with his mother’s friend Heza Barfor. His privacy, his time for solitude, had become brief and erratic, but he wasn’t sorry for it. He regarded, with astonishment and fondness, Alfhilda’s swift mind, Ĉejo’s earnest ideality.
“Do you know, there’s this rescue to be tried?” Alfhilda said to him.
He nodded over the soup.
“They’ll bring them up one by one in a survey balloon, dump the equipment and come up in the gondola,” she said, without looking at him to know whether he had made an answer. “Avino went over to Luza Kordoba’s house to tell them—in case they didn’t know it yet.”
Humberto’s mother hardly knew Luza or her family. People would wonder why she was taking this upon herself, or they would guess: it was a slight, cunning gesture of malice toward Juko Ohaŝi. Maybe by choosing to bring the rescue news to Luza’s family, she was deliberately, conspicuously choosing not to bring the news to Bjoro’s wife. She and Juko had an old enmity, grounded in guilt and blame, dating from the death of Humberto’s son, and he had long ago lost the energy for trying to heal it.
“What is it you’re doing with Anejlisa just now?” he asked Alfhilda, by way of turning the talk away from the Lark.
“We’re growing a hybrid from willow stock, a sort of mutation of the—” Humberto saw her tongue come forward, licking the soup, or the intractable word “—setsuka sachalinensis. Trying to get it to grow a root mass like the pussy willows, edible,” she told him.
“On the setsuka? I never hoped much for that one.” He lapped the soup thoughtfully. There was mushroom in it, and bright paprika; it was sharp, sweet. “I thought Anejlisa would go at it the other way, fiddle with the pussies.”
“She’s doing that too.” Alfhilda lifted the bowl, maybe hiding her mouth, her beam of satisfaction, behind the rim. “But I helped with the setsuka. Fixed the plates, and the droppers, and scraped the cells.” She looked at Humberto. “Are you reading the Kovalak book? I like that one.”
“I’m reading it. What? Are you picking it up when I set it down?”
She grimaced. “Only sometimes. I read wherever your marker is, a page or two.”
Kovalak’s was one of the old books he had from the library, its pages rebound between stiff boards and the paper sprayed with something slick and inflexible, a fixative or a mold-inhibitor. People handled such books with care—they were talismans, holy objects, and Kovalak’s work was lyrical, a kind of spiritual geography. Humberto read it not for instruction but for its gift of imagination, its passion and compassion for Earth’s lost species, its informed evocations of storms and migrations, aurora borealis, icescapes. Kovalak had been dead for two hundred years, but in the photo image on the frontispage he was in his forties, hunkered down on his heels on a gravelly scree and peering off narrow-eyed toward something behind the camera. He was long-jawed, bearded, had a look of dignity and reproach. Humberto said, “When I’m finished with it you can read it yourself, not just pieces.”
She made a childish face, rolling her bottom lip down. “Anejlisa has given me a lot to read: eight books, one is French.”
When they had finished the soup, the two of them took up reading companionably, though Humberto gave up trying to get at the complicated botanicals with Alfhilda asking him frequently the meanings of words, and reading things aloud when they struck her interest. Shortly Heza came in the house with a bundle of dyed yarn, and when she let her load down in the front room and started in about the balloon rescuing, Humberto had to finally give up trying to be alone. He put his reading away and got clean clothes and a towel in his arms and went along the pasado from his apartment to the men’s bathhouse.
Two men were washing, and one man and a child were in the tub. He nodded to people, got his clothes off, crouched naked under the spigot of a shower beside Karlos Onoda and Edvard Penagos. Karlos and Edvard kept on with what they were saying to each other, something to do with thermostats and parabolic mirrors; both of them worked in the smeltering of metals. They were married, raising young children, their lives marked off different circles from his. The dribble of the waterspout was tepid and soothing; he sluiced it over the back of his head, his neck.
“Probably you heard about this rescue that’ll be tried,” Karlos said to him.
He pushed the water out of his eyes. Both men were looking at him. “Yes. A balloon,” he said. Karlos’s chest was extravagantly hairy. In the stream of the shower, the hair lay against his skin in a smooth pelt which Humberto admired from the edge of his eye.
“It seems a risky thing, eh?” Karlos said, raising his eyebrows. Probably Karlos wasn’t asking a question, but Humberto felt he should nod, agreeing with a sort of wordless distress.
“Well anyway, there isn’t much mechanical can go wrong with a balloon,” Edvard said. “I’d trust it more than another go-down boa
t, was it me.” He said it in a grimacing way, as if he held mechanical things in high scorn. No one knew why the boat had tumbled, so people were placing blame on a vague failure of technology.
“How long will it be, before there’s some word of them?” the man in the tub called out above the water of the showers. His name was Umeno Flagstad, he was short and thick-bodied, his skimpy hair stuck up in a wet cockscomb. Umeno ground lenses for eyeglasses and for laboratory microscopes. Humberto thought he had spoken generally, but the others seemed to wait for Humberto to answer the question, as if his relation to Bjoro or Luza gave him a kind of authority.
“I don’t know,” he said. Then he also said, “A balloon isn’t something that can be moved precisely, I guess.” He spoke up, so his words borrowed from Pia Putala would reach Umeno sitting in the tub.
“Those radio people are sending down stingy notices,” Edvard said with bitterness. “There’s only a few words of news comes out from the hub every little while, but people say there’s a steady talking going on between the Ruby and the hub, should be ten people carrying the words down here if they were sharing it, but they’re keeping the most of it to themselves. I don’t know what they think they’re doing, those people.”
Humberto knew one of the people who worked at the radio, a man who had married a cousin of his. Before the Ruby had gone ahead, Noria’s radio work had been a sometime talking with the miners who went out on the slow tugs to capture little asteroids. Noria was a furniture maker, the radio had been something he did seldom and unhurried. But when the Ruby was launched, all the people who worked radio had had to drop their other work, just to keep ahead of the listening, and transcribing—putting committees’ belated questions to the Ruby, and running to get answers to questions that came back from the boat. What must it be like now the Lark was crashed?
