by Molly Gloss
There was a profound silence after old Nores sat down. Humberto thought he ought to refuse the shameless ascribing of human nature to these ants, but what he felt was a sudden deep ignorance of the quality of an ant’s psychic life. He looked down at the ground in front of his crossed knees. There was a beetle with an iridescent carapace making a slow way through the cottongrass and the dry leaves.
Elisabeta let the silence go on quite a while. Perhaps she knew the direction of Nores’s leading would make itself evident if they all waited long enough. Eventually someone stood and simply told about watching the ants on their narrow, beaten highways, endless columns of them homeward-bound, toting tiny pieces of green leaf that rose gigantically above their backs like great banners or rainhats. And someone else told of seeing a piece of leaf borne along by a big ant, with two or three small ants clinging aloft—the little ones had tried to help carry, maybe, but the big one had simply lifted the cargo, helpers and all, and marched away with it. And finally Gift Ŝu stood up and said, “I wonder. If we put leafy cuttings near their city, would they snub them, or be glad of the extra? When any of us have got fresh prunings, if we brought those over and laid them on their paths, maybe they would cut them up and carry them home and maybe that would lighten the pressure on the cinnamomum.”
Elisabeta raised her brows in surprise. She looked at Nores. “Will they take leaves cut fresh for them, Nores?”
The old man considered this before nodding solemnly. “They have a little preference for certain leaves, don’t like every kind. But what they like, they’d take cut as much as not, I think. In that book it said they would take from downed branches.”
And so a way was opened. Talk turned to the kinds of leaves the ants would accept, particular plants and shrubs, trees, herbs; and people made rough guesses about the kind and volume of pruning they’d be doing in the next weeks. Shortly, they got to speculating why some leaves weren’t suited for the ants’ use, and whether the ants’ little species of fungus was related to mushroom, or to lichen. When the discussion seemed to get around to repeating itself, Elisabeta interrupted and stated her sense of this last part of the meeting: An effort would be made to minimize the defoliation of the cinnamomum by furnishing leafy cuttings to the colony of farmer ants who had taken up living there. No one disagreed, and Gil Roko wrote it down as the tenth Minute of the Meeting.
That was all the business anyone raised. In the silence at the close, gradually Humberto found he was adrift in the space behind his closed eyes, a sort of dream, himself in a cavernous black chamber on his hands and knees weeding a white field of woolly kohlrabi.
He meant to get away from the Meeting quickly afterward but people stopped him, wanting to talk now about the Lark and the rescue, and he was slow getting home again, the light by then already lowered for dusk. Heza was out of the house, she’d had a meeting herself, of the Fiber Arts Committee, and frequently was late from those meetings, was one of the people prone to sit around afterward and do handwork while catching up gossip. Humberto’s father was playing cards with his cronies in the sadaŭ of a house over in Mandala. His mother and Alfhilda sat alone in the apartment, quietly playing Go. Alfhilda’s soup was eaten up, so Humberto went round to the kitchen house and steamed some bulgur in orange and ginger, made a ragout of beets, leeks, squash, cold lentils. He left some of this in the refrigerator for other people to find and brought his bowl back into the apartment, but then his mother and Alfhilda complained and he had to go into the kitchen again and bring the rest of the bulgur and the ragout for them to eat while they played Go.
“Ĉejo is waiting at his mother’s house,” Leona said. She was focused on the game. “Until there’s word of the Lark.”
He nodded. “The balloon.” He ate slowly while he watched them play and then he took his turn at it, finding a kind of relief in the concentration on strategy. He won with Alfhilda and then lost to his mother, and while he was waiting out their next game he got up, carrying their empty bowls, and came back with a banana and a bowl of figs. He and Alfhilda ate figs and kept on playing after Leona had gone to bed, but when Alfhilda had lost twice in a row she gave up in frustration, and Humberto went to bed himself rather than sit alone with botanical reading. He was afraid Heza, when she came in, would want to talk with him about the Lark.
As soon as he lay down he was half-asleep, thinking suddenly, I am too tired to worry tonight. But he woke when the boards of the floor groaned quietly in the darkness beside him. Ĉejo was coming to bed. How late was it? His limbs felt rigid, expecting a blow.
“What has happened?” he asked in a low voice.
“Bjoro is rescued,” Ĉejo said softly. “And Luza Kordoba. But Peder Ojama and Isuma Bun are killed.”
Humberto rolled onto his back. He stared blindly up into darkness. He didn’t know the two who were dead—he had been thoroughly spared grief. Immediately a kind of guilt settled on him, as if God had made this selection by considering Humberto Indergard’s interests ahead of other people’s.
“Isuma Bun is a second cousin to Katrin Amundsen,” Ĉejo murmured after a silence.
Katrin Amundsen was a name Humberto knew without a face, the most recent of the girls Ĉejo had loved in the last year. She lived in her grandmother’s household in Revenana, in the domaro where Ĉejo had spent his green years.
“I went to see if Katrin’s family had heard about the death,” Ĉejo said. “Maybe Katrin is a close friend with this cousin, or her grandmother could be also Isuma’s grandmother, and maybe they would want to know. But no lights were on in their rooms. I didn’t know if I should wake anybody.”
“It’s all right if they don’t learn about it until morning,” Humberto said quietly. “What can be done anyway, but crying?”
In the darkness, Humberto heard his son’s voice break. “I wanted to be there with her if she cried,” he said, crying himself. Ĉejo hadn’t yet grown out of an overemotional romanticism.
He was fiercely monogamous and loyal but his couplings tended to be brief. Almost as soon as a girl returned his attention he would put her in a desperate, smothering clasp, and when the girl tired of the weight, she’d quickly wriggle free. Humberto himself had been a casual lover at Ĉejo’s age, had accepted copulation as a kind of gift from girls without imagining romantic love was being offered too. Now that he was forty-six years old and for the last six years unmarried, he found he was more analytical. He seldom had coitus with a woman without wondering if he loved her; and he wondered about the quality of the love, and if it might become relaxed enough to support a marriage.
He remembered suddenly that time he had walked into the swung blade of Henriko Lij’s cane cutter, the long moment while Henriko gaped at him in astonishment and fear, and then the woman he didn’t know, Luza Kordoba, pushing by old Henriko and past Humberto’s own clutching hands to put her fingers deftly to his neck, pushing down in the hole through the spurt of his bright red blood, the swift, sure gesture that stopped him from bleeding out. While Henriko ran to get other people to help, people with surgical tools to close the hole, helplessly he had gripped Luza’s wrist and fixed his eyes on her, and she had squatted over him with her hand at his throat, in his throat, talking to him quietly about farming and weather, and when she was short of those subjects, instructing him irrelevantly about things she knew in her own fields, kinematics and linear momentum, acupuncture pressure points and homeostasis, until the warmth and even pressure of her hand on his pulse had become as compelling and sexual as an erection. It was the single time he had loved someone as Ĉejo loved, brief and burning, urgently holding on.
PART TWO
UNNAMED LANDS
6
Humberto
After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
HUMBERTO HAD A habit of sitting tog
ether with Anejlisa Revfiem, Edmo Smith, and Andreo Rodiba at Meetings of the Alaŭdo ŝiro—this was something that had started when they formed a little committee to study arctic plants and they had thought they might be asked to give a report at Monthly Meetings for Business. Now their work seemed irrelevant and ignored at these big Meetings where the issues shaped themselves around larger matters than plant genetics, but they had gone on sitting together for the pleasure they all had in arguing together afterward.
There were something near two hundred adults, ten houses in Alaŭdo. By the natural order of things only fifteen or twenty or twenty-five people were likely to gather on the loĝio of one of the houses for Monthly Meeting if there was nothing needing deciding, nothing consequential. Not many things really affected everyone; most decisions were made in Meetings of a domaro, or in committees. But for more than a year the Meetings of Alaŭdo ŝiro had been preoccupied with the New World and this was a matter that no one considered trivial. Habitually now as many as sixty or seventy or eighty people, whole committees and households, would come to answer the Queries, argue the Advices put to them by Yearly Meeting, or to raise issues they thought should be sent on to the clerk of Quarterly Meeting.
Isaba Aguto, who was clerk of the Alaŭdo meeting, had taken to dragging a table out onto the loĝio and sitting up on it so she could see faces and be heard in the crowd. Some people had complained about this, saying Isaba was putting herself above other people. But who knew the best way to guide a Meeting of such size? Poor Isaba was doing the best she could, some other people said.
Humberto wondered if all this arguing about Isaba’s methods came from people being closed-minded, or afraid of the real issues. He thought Isaba Aguto had a tendency to let an argument go on too long before putting the matter in the hands of a committee, and she had some habits that annoyed him, nervous mannerisms, but he never had thought she was self-important. When Isaba sat on a table, they all could see her and hear what she had to say, even from the edge of the loĝio where they were able to lean their backs against the outer wall of the kitchen. Humberto thought if Isaba sat down on the boards of the loĝio with other people, he and his friends might have to move in closer to hear what was being said, and Edmo Smith was stubborn, wouldn’t bring a repozo for sitting against, though he had a curved spine and couldn’t sit for long without support.
“Well, I don’t hear a unity of judgment,” Isaba said in frustration, and looked around at all their faces for someone who might disagree—someone who might want to put forward a leading that she hadn’t recognized. She had a long torso, looked tall while she was sitting, but when she stood she became short, and her long waist thick and straight, hipless as a man’s. She never had borne children, but Humberto didn’t know if this was related to her narrow pelvis, or to her marrying a man who already had been married once and had three living children.
People had been arguing about geothermal heat. There were innumerable hot springs on the New World, thousands of surface vents emitting hot gases or vapors, and the Energy Committee of Yearly Meeting had delivered a report saying the steam from those hot springs could be used for running machinery, making heat and light, for warming agricultural greenhouses, and that this might be a simpler thing than the complicated and slow process of cold fusion they relied on in the Miller. The geothermal sites stood mostly on the flanks of volcanoes, were prone to quakes, and there was considerable disagreement about the jeopardy; they had sent a query to all the ŝiros asking whether people wanted to build houses on firmer, flatter ground, and then find a means to pipe the heat and the power to those houses, from springs, solfataras, fumaroles, which might be dozens of kilometers away.
Humberto felt himself caught in an anxious, muddled thinking, while he strained to hear something that would open a way, free him from doubt. But Isaba hadn’t been able to keep people on the question. Inevitably the argument had deteriorated, sliding down to smaller and smaller issues. Who could say what was a reliably safe distance from a volcano? If houses were apart from the power plant, how would people who ran and repaired the machinery get from their houses to their work? Would they be expected to live, themselves, on the volcanoes, the fault lines? What if power-plant workers wanted to live at the power plant on the shaky slopes, but their families wanted to live in the houses on safe ground?
Isaba interrupted frequently, trying to broaden the question, to turn things upward, but people went on arguing logistics, making claims and counterclaims, and the important question was lost in ever-narrowing lanes and culs-de-sac. It was a compulsion they all had, a need to divide a question into its smallest components. Most people had given up the old wrangling over whether the New World would support human lives—they understood that it would, that the question was something else, something indecipherable, and that the scientific reports never would be able to explain the things that really mattered. But they went on suffering from a vague, irrational hope that if everything, every mystery of the New World, could be examined and known, then they would reach an understanding of how they felt about it.
Isaba Aguto prodded her chin with her fingertips. “The committee that’s been studying energy—are you on that committee, Lucina?” She gestured toward a woman and then returned her hand to her chin. “Will you take this Query back to them, ask them to restate it a little? Maybe if you bring it next month in different words, or another shape, we can all find some way to an agreement.” She went on exploring her chin thoughtfully a moment, pulling on it, looking out at people’s faces, before she tipped her head toward Samĉjo Penaflor, who was the recording clerk. “This geothermal matter is held over, then,” she said irritably, “until the question can be restated.” A long sigh went around while Samĉjo wrote down this Minute—people were frustrated by the inconclusive, discursive nature of the Meetings lately—but no one objected to Isaba’s conclusion, it was obvious no agreement had been reached.
A silence settled on everyone after Isaba had stated her sense of the Meeting. Humberto began to wonder if he ought to speak, now that the main business was set aside. Since he had been going on with his arctic studies he had lately had a dream: his bookish imagining of something he took to be a glacial tongue at the margin of a sea. In his dream, a bleak immense island broke from the edge of the glacier, fracturing slowly under the weight and pressure of the ice. In a bluish tableau, people stood on the ice floe and others at the edge of the broken shore ice in separate, wretched confusion, while the distance between them inexorably widened.
He hadn’t yet told the dream to anyone, but he thought it was rooted in his worry about the New World, or was something vaguely to do with their increasing disagreement and paralysis. People sometimes brought up impressions and inklings at the end of a Meeting, and he had been wondering, in the last few minutes, if his dream might be that kind of vague leading. But he seldom had spoken to a gathering larger than the Alaŭdo Farms Committee, hadn’t spoken at a meeting of the whole ŝiro since the numbers of listeners had become so many, the questions of such weight. He had little confidence in his judgment, felt himself easily swayed.
After a considered silence two or three people stood up abruptly and began to talk to one another, signalling that they considered the Meeting at an end. Humberto stood, and Edmo grunted and grimaced as he got himself up, pulling on the hand Humberto held down to him. Edmo wasn’t old—his youngest child wasn’t grown yet—but as he had aged his crooked spine had given him increasing pain. He had to stand up to spin thread, with his spinning jenny raised on a sort of platform. People made obscene jokes about Edmo and his wife, that they had intercourse standing up, and this was why his wife walked bowlegged. If Edmo had heard these jokes, he never had said. He reached around to knead the small of his back and straighten gingerly from hunching. “Well, hell,” he said, complaining. “That was a useless Meeting, eh? When there’s too many people, things get off the track. Here’s what I think: Every house ought to send only its clerk and maybe one other person to Monthl
y Meeting. Twenty people. That’s always a good size for coming to agreement.”
“Everybody’s entitled to a voice,” Anejlisa Revfiem said irritably. “You can’t tell people to keep home from a Monthly Meeting. They want to know what’s being said, even when they don’t speak out.”
“Well, nothing will get decided, then,” Edmo said grimly. “How can we get to any agreement, with so many people having a say in it?” He made a rude hand gesture that took in the bunches of people standing around them on the loĝio. “Must be eighty people, eh? ninety? a hundred people! A meeting will break down when we get these crowds, you know, that’s something we can count on.”
A rule by majority or by representation always had been anathema to the old Quakers, but it was mostly the size of the gathering that had kept Humberto from speaking, and he thought other people were daunted too—lately it was the same dozen or so who would stand and offer their voices, people not known for the weight of their judgment but for not being timid. Still, he had been coming to the ŝiro Meetings himself because he didn’t want to hear second-hand what was being decided or talked about now that the issues had always to do with the New World. He looked from one of them to the other but kept out of this argument between Edmo and Anejlisa, not knowing which side of it he stood on.
Andreo Rodiba had been looking down at his feet, considering. Humberto had a good opinion of Andreo. Often in the talking that went on after the Meeting it would be something Andreo said that would bring a thing into focus for him, make it comprehensible. Andreo wasn’t known for his gifts as a speaker but for a penetrating wisdom, a seeing-through to the simple truths.
Now he said cautiously, “I don’t know if it’s crowds that break down a Meeting—or not only crowds. It’s always been a spiritual method, eh? And it stops working when people give up being spiritual.”
