by Molly Gloss
They walked around to the Alaŭdo ŝiro, Kristina tired and slow, leaning into Juko. “Old age is not all it’s cracked up to be,” she muttered once, and flashed a sour grin.
One person, a woman they didn’t know, was in Humberto’s apartment, separating seeds from cottonsilk. This required them to sit down politely and help her get the work done, before it became possible to ask where Humberto was. “People are digging up the malanga taro, eh? this time of year,” she said. She went on pulling out the seeds with her quick old fingers while she gave them an earnest look, drawing her skimpy brows forward. Juko didn’t know if this was an answer.
They left the apartment and asked a man who was gathering eggs: Where was the field of taro planted? Looking for it, walking up the narrow beaten footway between the Ring River and the tiers of Alaŭdo fields, they saw a woman digging a test hole at the river’s slack edge and when she stood up it was Leona—Humberto’s mother—her trousers rolled at her thighs and her bare old legs glazed with mud. She made a sound when she saw Juko, a breathing out. In a moment, the old woman’s chin convulsed and she deliberately stooped to her hole. Juko’s impulse was to say something serene, something commonplace, as if there was no history between them, but her brain was suddenly filled up with too much that was consequential.
Kristina said, when they had walked past Leona, “Was that woman your mother-in-law?” and Juko said irritably, “You’re my mother-in-law.”
The big heart-shaped leaves of the malanga taro were brown and dead, and Juko’s son was standing out in the spent field digging up the tubers with a wide-tined fork while Humberto sat at the edge of the field watching the work, his weight on one haunch with his other leg outstretched. Kristina put her hand on his scalp, petting. The shaky, weighted turning of his head was obscurely evocative: Juko’s heart turned with it. Someone had cut his hair very short, baring around his ears a curving bow of skin that was pale and tender; his face had become bony, unfamiliar, asymmetrical. He looked at Kristina and then Juko one-eyed without surprise, or he had lost the knack for displaying it. “Ha,” he said, twisting his mouth.
Ĉejo came out of the field and the four of them sat together and talked about the taro harvest, and a repair someone was making to the plumbing under a nearby domaro, and rumors and gossip to do with the people crewing the Dream. Humberto sat clasping one hand with the other, his outstretched leg trembling slightly, his bidden eye following people as they spoke. It was an effort for him to speak himself, the words thick and slow, but Ĉejo had developed an ear for making out his father’s meanings, and sometimes Juko understood the gist of Humberto’s words from Ĉejo’s responses. It occurred to her, watching the two of them talking slowly back and forth, that if Humberto had once stood at the center of the Light, he was standing somewhere else now. But gradually she understood some of his words herself. When they were arguing about an opossum that had become a pet, Humberto said laboriously, “Gives up. Rightful. For safe,” and his eye moved from one of them to the other. When he looked at Juko it was an old look, natural and dear, his brows rising in that self-effacing way, and she was pierced suddenly with a sad, indefinable longing. None of us are standing in the old places, she thought.
She and Kristina made a slow way home in the afternoon light. When they were stepping over the narrow channel of the mezlando aqueduct, she said, “Oh hell,” and stopped suddenly, straddling the little ditch. “We forgot to ask about Humberto’s marriage.” Kristina shook her head, going on up the footway without slowing, beginning the easeful climb to the high houses of Pacema.
Their rooms were empty, mournful with the yellowing light of dusk. Juko and Kristina did not speak, sitting over separate handwork. When Kristina’s chin fell to her breast, when she began to snore softly, Juko studied her sleeping. She thought of going out quietly, going onto the sail. After a while she did.
In these last weeks, the little orange sun had gradually become a source of light. Now in the blackness, objects were bright. Inside the exo, in sunlight, Juko’s skin was warm, and on the shadow side of something, cold. The purity of the unreflected light was a comfort, clarifying. She went out to the field called the Wayward Gate and climbed to the head of the flymast. The sails were a vast wheel of light, luminous in the perfect blackness. From the head of the mast, it was possible to see the edge of light bound to the blackness in an intricate, inextricable coherence. Over the broad, bright field of the sheet she became exact, contained, a foot or an elbow like an oar dipped in still water moving her precisely. In the soundlessness, the depthlessness of space, there was the sense of a slight shudder, a susurrus on the black brightness. She floated on it, drawing her body through the light.
Vintro
(Of many debts incalculable,
Haply our New World’s chiefest debt is to old poems.)
THAT TIME WHEN the Migremo fell into the sea, I was standing with my sister Kikuma in a small open boat in the Ŝiblingo Fjord below the houses of Holds Loneliness, getting in the kelp with rakes. Little squalls of rain came and went, but in the still air between them the sea was green, the color people call marblua, and the skin of the water was lacquered, glossy, beneath a colorless sky. A puso weather was moving in from the northwest but we weren’t worried yet, only watchful. We were working between the beach and the stacks, a kilometer or a kilometer and a half from the shore, riding a heavy sea anchor, and the boat had a high waist, tipped up horns, it was built for handling a surf. Both of us had heavy-weather gear. And the puso weather would be a while getting here: The cloud wrack was faintly bluish white, lit by the Sea Is Groaning ice fields that stand off the coast there. We wouldn’t begin to worry much about the weather until the belly of the clouds, moving toward the coast over the open water, became the griseous color people call Water Sky.
There was another, bigger boat within shouting range, five people in it. One of the five, Adria Berelo, had a progressive disease of her muscles, a dystrophy. All of them kept this in their minds—it was a serious matter—but they were not governed by it, and no one in that boat was solemn: There was a good deal of talking going on and laughter, and Kikuma and I in our own boat sometimes yelled over there to ask what was making those people laugh; I guess we suffered a little from feeling excluded, deprived.
Kikuma and one of the men in that other boat, Davido Ĉekli, began to trade insults back and forth over the water. They were longtime kite fighting opponents, and you know how it is with kite people—when they aren’t crossing their strings they’re crossing words. They think when people are gathered in one place, digging roots or laying out kelp in wracks, and then stopping to eat their lunch, if you raise a kite it’s an open challenge, and they want to be the last one to hold the sky—they coat their strings with ground glass. When the Migremo came apart, the two of them were shouting their gibes and I was laughing, and you know how it is when thunder is so far off you can only hear it in your bones? That was how I heard the breaking up of the Migremo, just in that way, its shudder going through the air as a dull booming, and when I lifted my head, looking, there was a daylight star scribing a long arc across the overclouded sky, trailing embers and ash, going down to the western sea. “Hey. What,” Kikuma said, turning to look. “Hey, Ana, what did we see?” and I wasn’t able to think of how to answer.
People say, all truths wait in all things. Here is something waiting inside something else: When I was a child we would go up, summers, to that place people call Embracing, and live in my great-aunt’s latajo on the steep west side. You know how a latajo’s walls are open? How they let in the air and the daylight and people’s voices—the whole world? From the inside of that latajo you could look the long way out onto the maltejo, or up the long slope of land to where the mountains broke above the alta, and at night when Kikuma and I were lying in our bed we could see the old stars, and the little new star sliding like a bead of ice over the roof, and it seemed as if you could look a great long way up into the sky.
Once in the winter, after
my family had moved back under the berm at Having Wind, I went up on the alta looking for some particular stones—some of us were laying out the pattern of a vocero on the flat of the plain—and I came up to Embracing and looked into my aunt’s latajo and the light that lay inside it was a certain color, had a certain quality. That was in the years people call the malsataj. Do you remember those years? The famine and the hard living? People were making their winter tea from pouring hot water over gravel, in those years.
Later in my life, when I flew in a balloon over Holds Loneliness and saw for the first time the color of the deep ice along the edge of the glacier, I thought of that latajo, the light inside it, lying empty in the winter. And later when I was standing in that boat in the Ŝiblingo Fjord watching the long curve of fire, the Migremo falling over the edge of the sky and into the sea, I remembered the way the land looked when I was hanging from that balloon above Holds Loneliness, everything seeming to move in sweeping arches, the stones off the shore standing in long curving palisades, and the breaking sea rolling slow and broad, grayed with sand, and the long grasses streaming under the wind, and the falls along the edge of the fjord flying on the breath of air, upward like smoke, and the beads of rain falling so fine that it was still possible to see the sun and the violet sky, but spreading the light in a great, brilliant, doubled cielarko, its shining feet seeming to rest on the oxbows of the mountains with the tongue of the glacier framed within it. That’s why the people of the coast have that certain look behind their eyes, I was thinking then. That’s why they don’t want to live anywhere else.
So afterward, after I had moved into my sister’s household at Holds Loneliness and was standing in that boat on the Ŝiblingo Fjord getting in the kelp, and the Migremo fell out of the sky in a flaming arch, I didn’t think of people’s deaths—that I was standing watching people dying. I was thinking of the winter light inside an empty latajo, and the way the beads of ice in a fine rain bend the light in a vivid rainbow.
Afterward, a little while afterward, there was a moment while I wondered if it was the old Miller giving up its orbit at last, but somebody in the other boat yelled, “Was that the Migremo falling?” and then I remembered the Migremo had been up there getting salvage from the empty houses, the feral woodlands, inside the torus, and coming down today onto the long landing field southeast of Divided. I wondered if the people over at Divided, listening on the uplink, had heard the dull clap, had felt it shuddering along their bones.
We watched the tendril of smoke thicken, become a brume of steam rising out of the sky line. Kikuma said quietly, “Are they lying in the Owl Strait, Ana? Off the Mizerido estuary?” and then someone in the other boat yelled out, “In the Owl Strait, looks like!” After a bit, those people in the other boat put their oars in the water and rowed over to us so they wouldn’t have to keep on shouting. We looked at one another. Then people began saying how much sea they thought was between us and the wreckage of the Migremo and how quick they thought we could get across it, and whether our little boat, the Pulls Together, being quicker than their big boat, the Keeps Steady, ought to wait up or go on ahead without waiting, and whether it would be better to run on across the strait to the Goes To Grass Islands and lie snug, after we’d got the Migremo people aboard, or try to beat back along the lee of the cape, back here to Holds Loneliness.
We didn’t want to get out in the Owl Strait and not be able to make land when the puso weather came in from the sea—we didn’t want to go down into the water with the Migremo. But no one said this. No one said, The winds are northwesterly. No one said, Look, that puso weather is over there, over the ice. Only Magdalena Ulsen’s young son, earnest and distracted, said, “There won’t be anyone alive, do you think?” and Magdalena looked around sorrowfully and said “Oh, I suppose not,” and began to coil up the lines in readiness for getting under way.
There were five of them to get their anchor up, their mast on the wind, and they were off ahead of us, beating west-northwest around the little skerries, the Fisted Rocks, but when we stepped our windpipe the Pulls Together made a little twitch, taking a breath, and skated off nimbly on the light air.
I had to look behind once, to the heavy white foot of the glacier and the berms of Holds Loneliness cockling the steep last downhill at the head of the fjord, and seaward from the berms the fretwork of low stone walls sheltering people from the sea winds, and below on the outwash plain that once was a glacier, the cobble of the beach, mossy bogs and hummocks of grass where terns hunted down the fingers of the streams, and people laid out kelp in long wracks, drying in the wind.
I don’t know what I was looking for.
We passed the Steady in the open water west of the Fisted Rocks and when they fell behind us we dumped wind and kept them to our starboard side. Kikuma steered off the ragged brume, south-southwest into the Owl Strait. The Comes-Between Cape reared its head along the port beam, a great prow of basalt pocked with indentations and ledges, a summer nesting place for thousands of ribb’d gulls but now a many-roomed empty house. In this season of the year, the vintro, people like to visit those rooms—when we sailed into the Owl Strait looking for the Migremo there was a tiny figure, maybe it was a woman, standing high up on the whitened bluff of the cape, watching our boats, or looking out toward the smoke of the wreck, or offering something into the sky. I’ve climbed up there myself. On a clear day you can see the Goes To Grass Islands riding in the strait like boats, the tidal currents running so fast through the channels there, they drag long wakes astern. But there was no seeing the islands in that weather, the day the Migremo fell, and anyway people don’t climb the Comes-Between Cape only for that view across the Owl Strait. When people are feeling the weight of their own lives, they want to see the life other animals are given, and there is something mysterious and revealing about the discarded machinery of birds’ lives. In abandoned flakes of eggshell, emptied seed cases, the hollow stems of cottongrass, in the delicate attenuated backbones of fish and the teeth of desiccated crustaceans, you can sometimes glimpse the bare and intricate structures of God.
The mountains of Abides were shrouded in cloud, so when we had come clear of the cape it was the long thin line of the escarpment that fixed the eastern edge of the sea. Westward, there was no line dividing the sky from the sea, and in the distant bourns of the strait we could not see the islands. Southward lay the long spine of Resting-Waiting; in other weather it might have defined the whole southern range of the horizon, the narrow peaks impounding the cirques of old glaciers, the steep headwalls streaked with snow and stone, but it was hunkered, like Abides, beneath a lowering sky. Sailing up the Owl Strait in this kind of weather, you’re at the edge of the world, engirt by emptiness.
The little estuary of the Mizerido was bound in shorefast fog, so we kept an ear out for the voices of seeking-browns, those brief and reluctant flyers wintering over in the brushy aits of the Mizerido. We took our bearing from the faint ululations of their barks, and veered west by northwest, crossing and re-crossing the Steady’s tack, our two boats scribing a braid on the water. Gradually the column of smoke from the Migremo, blowing off eastward, became flat and gray, indistinguishable from the overcast, and then I went up on the bowstalk to look out for the wreckage. The wind was cold and dank. For a while I called down to Kikuma, stupid questions or remarks about the boat, and I kept looking over to the northwest where the puso weather was stalled above the ice fields. But after a while I got finished with that.
You know how it is when your mind enters into a silence with the land? when you give up speaking, and you give up listening for gulls or watching for a shift in the weather, and just begin to place yourself in the world? That was how it was when I was up on the bow stalk looking for the wreckage of the Migremo. Long patches of ruffled water, families of the great silver-backed balenoj going up to their wintering place in the By Far fjord; squalls of rain shadowing the sea; rafts of flag-dippers, gray-green against the gray-green water, the yellow bills of those seabird
s seeming to slide like a scurf of petals on the water: I recognized and understood these patterns of light in a dreamy unvoiced way while I waited for my eye to take in what was not of the land—floating plastic, aluminum, the sufflated exo of a dead person—and say it to me on a breath, like a word spoken aloud—There.
We came off the wind, steering for a big piece of a shattered bulkhead, ribbed white, streaked with soot, and we grappled with the kelp rakes, getting it up into the boat. None of the people on the Migremo were known to me, not even their names, but in the illegible letters on the smooth facade of that bulkhead, beneath great flakes of sodden ash, broken blisters of paint, I could see their faces. That piece of wreckage was a ghostly thing. Kikuma and I passed a sorrowful look between us.
We beat a zigzag path over the water, going after a sudden swarm of flotsam—more plastic and forced aluminum, a spongy piece of batting, a tangle of flash tubing. We shouted our finds to the people in the Steady, and they called theirs back—a ravel of wiring! here’s some webbing! got a piece of a bolster, looks like, or a seat! We went off to gather up a flotilla of broken crates, and when the Steady was a distant white figure on the water someone over there shouted, the voice feeble, indeterminate across the wind. We raised up from what we were doing and looked. A person gestured with upraised arms. I understood something all at once, with my body, with my blood; and I took hold of the tiller, brought the boat around wallowy on the waves. “They’ve found one of those people,” I said to my sister.
There had been four, crewing the Migremo; one of them was tangled in nylon line in a wrack of bladderweed that Adria Berelo on the Steady had pulled up to the side of that boat with a rake. This was a small woman, young as my daughter, her white exo breached at the chest—pale rags of fat and muscle flapped from the hole. Her face was open and calm, her mouth slopping in the gray lees of water inside the exoskull. Her eyes examined the sky.
