by Greg Egan
Working with two hands at once, Yalda plucked the seed cases from the stalks on either side of her, squeezed them until they popped, emptied them into the pouches she’d formed, then dropped the cases on the ground. It wasn’t heavy work, like digging a store-hole, but the sheer repetitiveness of it took its toll. Though she’d toughened the wedge-shaped fingers she’d made to prise open the cases, after a while they started to yield to the pressure and she had to stop and re-form them. And when her arms and hands grew too sore to continue, she had no choice but to extrude a new pair and rest the muscles she’d been using. She was yet to acquire the endurance of a seasoned harvester, but her size alone had its advantages. While her male cousins cycled between two pairs of arms, and Claudia, Aurelia and the men three, by mid-afternoon Yalda was on her fifth pair, with the flesh that had formed the first still tucked away deep in her chest, recuperating.
At the end of each row she emptied her pouches into one of the grain carts that her brother and sister were nudging along the cross-paths, then she turned into the next row to start all over again. Giusto had told her that after the first day her body would refine her posture to make the work easier, but that there was no point in anyone instructing her on how to get there sooner; the adjustment was different for each person, and better achieved through instinct than imitation.
By dusk Yalda was exhausted, but it was satisfying to see how high the yellow grain was piled in the carts. She helped Lucio push one to the central bin that the merchant’s truck had left for them to fill.
“If I join the harvest next year,” Lucio asked her, “who’ll handle the carts?”
“We’ll take turns,” Yalda replied, trying her best to make the guess sound authoritative. Questions were for someone whose opinion was worth seeking: an older cousin, not a sibling. But apparently her size alone, having won her a place in the harvest, had come to mean more than her true age.
Everyone sat leaning against the huge bin as they ate the evening meal. Yalda gazed up at the darkening sky and listened to her father and uncle enthusing about the yield and the quality of the grain, while Aurelia teased Claudio by repeatedly punching him on the arm and then taking his retribution without flinching. Yalda felt peaceful; she still missed Dario, but she knew the good harvest would have pleased him.
Later, as the other children were scrambling into their beds, Yalda spotted one of the grain carts sitting at the end of its row, still full. She thought of calling Lucia to deal with it, but whatever the privileges of her newfound seniority-by-size, she didn’t want to set herself above her own sister. She went to wheel the cart in herself.
When she had brought it to the foot of the ramp leading up to the top of the bin, she paused to straighten the wheels. “I just don’t want to lose a good worker like that!” she heard Giusto complain. They were on opposite sides of the bin, but his voice was clear.
“She’ll still be with us at harvest time,” her father replied.
“A few days a year! And for how many years?”
Vito said, “I promised her mother: if any of the children showed signs that they’d benefit from an education, I’d do my best to send them to school.”
“She never saw this one in the field!” Giusto retorted. “If she’d known what she’d be asking us to give up, I doubt she would have been so insistent.”
Vito was unmoved. “She’d have wanted every one of her children to have the best life they could.”
“I’ll teach her to recite the sagas,” Giusto promised. “That will keep her mind busy.” Yalda recoiled; Dario’s stories had been entertaining, but Giusto could ramble on for half the night, listing the unlikely deeds of a dozen tedious heroes.
“It’s not just about her getting bored with farm work,” Vito said. “She’s never going to find a co-stead hanging around here.”
“Does that matter?” Giusto replied, bemused. “She works as hard as any four children. And it’s not as if she’s your only chance at grandchildren.”
Yalda clomped noisily up the ramp and emptied the cart into the bin; when the sound of falling grain had died away the conversation had come to an end.
By the time Yalda climbed into bed even Aurelia was asleep, too tired for their usual exchange of whispered jokes and taunts before the adults joined them. Yalda lay watching the stars in flight—trailing histories unadorned by bombast and braggadocio, just waiting for her to learn how to decipher them.
The possibility of school was thrilling: it meant walking right into the storehouse of knowledge, the source of all the answers to the questions she struggled with. At school, she could find out how the stars shone, how her flesh changed its shape, how plants knew night from day.
But nobody went to school merely to satisfy their curiosity; they went to learn new skills that their own families couldn’t give them. A farmer’s child who studied did not stay on the farm. They went out into the world and left their old life behind.
On the evening of the last day of the harvest, the merchant’s truck returned to carry away the grain. Yalda stood and watched while Vito, Giusto, and the truck’s driver, Silvana, maneuvered the ramp the harvesters had used to fill the bin into position for a new purpose: to slide the bin itself up onto the back of the truck.
Chains were unwound from the truck’s winch and hooked to the edge of the bin. As the engine clattered and the winch began to turn, a swarm of sparks rose from the truck’s chimney and drifted away into the gloom, like the mites in the forest ascending from Dario’s skin.
The bin was jutting over the top of the ramp, poised ready to tip down and sit flat on the truck’s bed, when the engine suddenly cut out. Silvana leaped from the cab and tugged open a hatch at the side of the vehicle.
Yalda gazed into the labyrinth of machinery, entranced. Silvana saw her, and with a friendly gesture invited her to come closer. “This is the fuel,” she said, taking the lid off a hopper full of orange powder. “And this is the liberator.” A second, smaller hopper fed a fine gray dust in from the front. “The fuel wants to become light, but it can’t do it alone. Mix it with the liberator, though…” Silvana brought her hands together, then rapidly drew them apart. “Both of them turn to light and hot gas. The gas forces up the piston, which turns the crankshaft. Then the gears connect that motion either to the wheels at the front, or the winch.”
Yalda had been told not to pester strangers with her questions, but this woman’s generosity and enthusiasm emboldened her. “Why did it stop working?”
“Just a blockage, I think.” Silvana opened a smaller access hatch below the two hoppers and started tapping along the length of a pipe. “You can hear it, when they get clogged up. Ah, yes.” She tapped the same point repeatedly to demonstrate the dulled sound, then she fetched a hammer from the cab and whacked the pipe with alarming force. There was a spasm deep in the truck’s body, and sparks rose from the chimney again, but the engine did not start up in earnest; this was just the fuel that had been trapped finally meeting its fate.
“What are the sparks?” Yalda asked.
“When the mixture’s not quite right,” Silvana replied, “some of the fuel’s still burning as it comes out with the gas.” She nudged a knob below the fuel hopper, turning it a barely perceptible amount. “That controls the outlet from the tank. As the pipes get encrusted you need to make adjustments.”
Silvana returned to the cab and started the engine, hauling the bin up into place, then Giusto helped her secure it for the journey.
As the truck drove off, Giusto approached his brother. “What a waste, training a woman to do that,” he declared. “In a few years they’ll just need someone new.”
Vito didn’t reply. Yalda thought of Doctor Livia; the news in the village was that she’d given birth, and her father was seeing all her old patients. Yalda had returned from the forest convinced that Doctor Livia’s advice to Dario had been worthless, but then she’d started wondering if the true reason for proposing the journey had been to lessen the risk to a dyin
g man’s family, when the honest prognosis might have been impossible for them to accept.
Lucio and Lucia fetched the loaves for the evening meal. It was late, and everyone was tired; they ate sprawled on the flattened ground where the bin had sat. Tomorrow the whole family would go into the village to celebrate, spending some of the money the harvest had brought them. Yalda was proud of the part she’d played, but she felt an odd pang of regret that it was over; the work had come to an end just as her body was growing used to it.
Without warning, a line of light streaked across the sky. Long and slender, dazzlingly bright and richly colored, it disappeared beyond the horizon before Yalda could let out a chirp of astonishment.
It was Claudia who spoke first. “What was that?”
“A shooting star,” Giusto replied. “A shooting star, fast and low!”
Yalda waited for her father to correct him; Vito had pointed out shooting stars to her many times, and they had never looked like that. She closed her eyes to try to bring back the apparition. The streak of light had come and gone in an instant, but she was sure it had contained a clear progression of colors—a trail like a star’s, but vastly longer. Shooting stars were lumps of rock falling through the air, having drifted by chance into the path of the world; they did not move so rapidly that the colors of their light were separated. Their trails were nothing but a fire in the air that kept burning for a moment or two as they passed.
When Vito remained silent, Yalda could not contain herself. “That wasn’t a shooting star,” she said. “It was too fast.”
“How do you know that?” Giusto demanded. “What if it was traveling just above us?” He was trying to sound amused, but Yalda could tell he was affronted that any child would presume to correct him. He stood up and took a few steps toward her, then swiped his arm along a wide arc, almost slapping her. “Even my hand can cross the sky for you before you flinch, if it’s close enough.”
Yalda wanted to say something about the color trail, but the strange object had vanished so quickly. What if no one else had noticed the pattern she’d seen?
“And if it wasn’t a shooting star,” her uncle concluded triumphantly, “what was it?”
Yalda had no reply. She could not name or describe anything that could race from horizon to horizon in an instant, spilling its colors across a third of the sky.
Silvana, who made light in her engine every day, might have known the answer. Clara would surely have known, and would have told her friend Vita. But if her mother had chosen to keep a few of the secrets of light from Vito, Yalda couldn’t blame her.
She lowered her gaze and let Giusto believe that she had deferred to his wisdom and accepted his claim. She had to be patient. In school, she would discover everything.
On the first day of class, Vito walked with Yalda into the village. He’d told her he had business to conduct, but she suspected that he would have accompanied her anyway.
“In the old days,” Vito mused as a truck rattled past them, “they used to say there was no point in educating boys. They believed that a mother’s knowledge shaped her children from birth, while anything their father tried to pass on to them only went skin deep. To educate a girl was to invest in every future generation; to educate a boy was to turn your wealth into straw.”
Yalda had never heard of such ideas before; they had to come from older days than Dario’s youth. “Do you think that’s true?”
Vito said, “I don’t believe an education’s wasted on anyone who takes it seriously, boy or girl.”
“But do you think a mother’s knowledge is passed on to her children?”
Vito said, “Clever as you are, I’ve never heard you speak a word of your mother’s that didn’t reach you through me.”
They entered the village from the south-east corner and detoured around the crowded markets in favor of the quieter tree-lined avenues. The small parks they crossed were mostly empty of people, but Yalda’s gaze kept turning to the trees; since her trip into the forest she found herself noticing far more easily than before the lizards scuttling along their branches.
The school was enclosed by a thick hedge of matted twigs that Yalda had no trouble peering over; the broad square of bare ground within was twice divided by similar barriers. There were four classes, Vito explained; he led Yalda to the corner where the youngest students were gathering.
“Don’t let anyone discourage you,” he said.
Yalda had heard enough of Giusto’s comments to know what her father meant. “I won’t,” she assured him.
Vito left her, and Yalda walked through the gap in the hedge.
There were almost four dozen children assembled in this part of the square; maybe half were lone boys, while the rest looked like paired cos. Yalda searched hopefully for another unaccompanied girl, but then she forced herself to stop fretting. She tried meeting the gaze of some of the students who were chatting in a small group in front of her, but nobody acknowledged her and she was too shy to intrude into their conversation.
The teacher arrived, calling to the children for silence then introducing himself as Angelo. He herded them into a tight cluster away from the hedge, then instructed them to sit and watch him carefully.
Yalda glanced at her neighbors; they were both boys, about half her size. “I’m Fulvio,” whispered the boy on her right.
“I’m Yalda.”
“Today,” Angelo began, “we’ll learn the symbols and their names.” Chatter from the other classes, still teacherless, filled the air, but Yalda forced herself to concentrate.
Angelo formed a circle on his chest, as quickly and sharply as if it had been stamped there by a wheel pressed against his body. “This is called ‘the sun,’” he said. Yalda was expecting him to ask them to try to reproduce the symbol on their own skin, but after repeating the name several times he moved straight on to the flower; this lesson was to be about committing the shapes and names to memory, not about writing anything themselves.
Yalda listened dutifully as he worked his way through ten dozen symbols; she had never known that there were so many. By the time he’d finished it was close to noon, and he asked some of the children to fetch loaves from a store-hole and hand them out.
As they ate, Angelo walked among them asking for their names and the names of their fathers. Yalda felt an odd sense of trepidation when he approached her, as if her right to join the class might be in doubt, but when she gave her reply he moved on without another word. Whatever the shifting beliefs of the wider world as to who was worth educating, Vito must have paid this man some of the money from the harvest, and that was all it took to be permitted to attend.
“Where’s your co?” Fulvio asked her, the crumbs spilling from his mouth bouncing off his tympanum as he spoke.
“Where’s yours?” Yalda retorted.
“Working,” Fulvio replied.
“She ate her co,” the boy on her left said; Yalda had heard him give his name as Roberto. “How else does anyone get so bloated?”
“That’s right, I ate him,” Yalda agreed. “But sometimes he still wants to come out and play.” She raised a hint of a head-shaped lump in the middle of her chest, like Amato in the story; Roberto quailed, then leaped to his feet and fled to the far side of the class.
Fulvio reached out and prodded the lump with one finger, then chirped with delight. “Can you teach me to do that?”
“Why? No one will believe you ate your brother.”
“What about a younger cousin?”
“Perhaps,” Yalda conceded.
“So you’re a solo?”
“What do you think?” Yalda resorbed the fake head; other children had started staring.
“I don’t know, I never met a solo before,” Fulvio confessed. “You’ve really got no brothers or sisters?”
Yalda tried to be patient with him; her neighbors had all simply known about her, she hadn’t had to spell things out for them. “I’ve got a brother and a sister, Lucio and Lucia. My mother ha
d three children.”
“Oh.” Fulvio’s eyes widened with relief. “That’s not so bad. It would be lonely if she’d had just one.”
Yalda was on the verge of irritably declaring that it was impossible for a woman to have just one child, but then it struck her that she wasn’t entirely sure that that was true. “I live with four cousins too,” she said. “I promise you it’s not lonely at all.”
Angelo called the class to order and began working his way through the symbols again, this time inviting his students to shout out the names as the shapes appeared on his skin. Yalda had forgotten half of them already; some of the symbols looked like nothing in the world, and their names were equally baffling. But even when the responses dropped from deafening choruses to shy whispers, there were always three or four children who knew the answers.
When Angelo announced that they’d finished for the day, Yalda was frustrated; she knew she had to learn to read and write before anything else, and she hadn’t even managed to complete the first step of that journey.
“Where do you live?” Fulvio asked her as they left the schoolyard.
“On our farm, east of the village. You?”
“On the west side,” he replied. “My father has a refinery, so we live right next to it.”
“What kind of refinery?”
“Truck fuel.”
Yalda was intrigued, but she kept her curiosity in check; the courteous thing was to ask about people’s family. “What about your cousins?”
“They’re close by. My uncle’s family is in the same business.”
Yalda didn’t want to part from her new friend immediately by retracing the route she’d taken with her father, so she steered a middle way and walked due south as they chatted, until they ended up near the center of the village.
“Should we cut through the markets?” she asked. She had no money, but she was happy just to wander around the stalls, trying to guess the ingredients in the fancier foods or the origins of the strange trinkets.
