“I don’t recall eating any corn here,” mused Megan.
“It’s not corn,” Susannah repeated with a trace of impatience. She rubbed her fingertips together, testing the soil texture. “Like corn. It could be feed grain for the animals. Or perhaps it’s only used when ground into meal. You know, I still haven’t done that full diet breakout. What the hell have I been doing these past two weeks?”
“Practicing medicine, a perfectly valid pursuit,” Megan replied, thinking that she ought to have done the diet study herself. “How long should it take such a seed to come up?”
“Depends. On the temperature, on the moisture. Corn will begin to show within a long week, earthtime, if the conditions are ideal. Takes longer if it’s wet or cold,” she added significantly. “Also, even the earliest of our corns need a solid month and a half to ripen, and those are our newest bioengineered hybrids. Either the Sawls are very sure of the weather this time, or…” She paused to let the sweep of her arm include the rising sun, which had finally vaulted clear of the sawtoothed horizon. The terraces were a descending flight of mirrors reflecting the malachite sky. “Or all this is a magnificent gamble.”
Megan grunted, smiled.
“I thought you’d like that,” Susannah continued. “But it’s true. They could be just taking a chance that the weather will hold. If they lose, this whole effort will be wasted, washed out, blown away, frozen solid or whatever by the next natural disaster this world has in store for us.”
Megan’s smile twisted ever so slightly. “No wonder they’re hurrying.”
26
Thrust from the familiar darkness, Stavros felt out of phase.
Like being born, he thought fuzzily.
Not a thing he was altogether sure he had liked in the first place. Liphar had found him in the Black Hole, sunk in a drift of Sawl paper and Terran photographs. Amid joyful cries that the Planting was done and the Feast being laid, the young man had bullied him out of his protective shell of concentration and dragged him forth with irresistible merriment into the building pressure of the midday heat to join the celebration.
Stavros felt as if he were floating in light. His eyes watered. He sat hunched on a thick rug that softened the rock edges beneath him. At his back, the cliff face was blindingly bright. The sun seemed too fat and too close. Its amber glare filtered through the open-weave canopy to rest like palpable weight on his head and shoulders.
Stavros could not remember if he liked the heat of the sun. Surely his ancestors, both the Greek and the Portuguese, had flourished under that other sun, Earth’s sun, in the days when it had still shone on them clearly.
Should I lie down in the open and bask, like a lizard?… Fitting for one who lives his life as a cultural chameleon.
He liked the thought that this sun would quickly burn his skin as dark as the Sawls’. He felt his muscles uncurling petal-like to its warmth. During his three-day bout of manic concentration, he had slept only in snatches. His confusion hinted at deep exhaustion. His brain was as blurry as his eyes, both still cave-adjusted.
He heard water, he thought, ripples on a lake. But it was the soft lapping of the multicolored banners tied to the tent poles. An ocean of billowing canopies brightened the rock terraces as far as he could see. A thousand guy ropes had been laced with silken streamers, yellow and red and orange, so that Lagri’s colors dazzled him wherever he looked. Joyous crowds wrapped in rainbows milled about in the shadow and sunlight.
Stavros shut his eyes as his brain threatened a sensual overload. His shutdown was like irising in a lens. The confusion was manageable if he restricted the incoming data. He concentrated on the knobby beige and gray wool of the rug, on the subtle twistings of the unbleached fibers.
They must have hauled out every rug and cushion in the Caves for this, he thought.
A mug of chilled herb drink sat beside him, one ice chunk still afloat. The pale clay sweated in the heat.
Ice. Another Sawl wonder. He had not known about the ice-storage caverns until now.
In his lap was a platter of food that he dimly recalled being set before him by a flushed and laughing cook’s apprentice. The platter was a satiny wooden oval, divided in quarters like a Terran child’s dish, but the size of a serving tray. It was wide enough to balance securely on his knees as he sat cross-legged. Stavros inspected its contents distantly, as if it were a museum display or a piece of conceptual art. He nudged a pile of boiled yellow roots. One toppled and jumped its wooden corral, rolling into a lump of white mash next to several thick chunks of dark orange bread. He twisted an experimental fingertip in the mash. It was lukewarm but tasted spicy, like a cooked radish, or a turnip with pepper in it. He recognized it as specially prepared kamad root. Comforted, he ate a little more.
Food is so very real.
He widened his iris to admit sound. His ears were used to sorting out the worst kind of cacophony in the Caves. He did not worry that they would overload and betray him, even though sound was different here, outside of the stone echo chambers. Uncontained, it was allowed to fade with distance or drift away with a passing breeze.
He heard music around him, many instruments pursuing many different melodies. Conversation hummed across the several acres shaded by the canopies, gossip and debate, broken by laughter and the clatter of dishes, by a child’s excited giggle, and here and there by satisfied mutual silence. The many tunes were muted. The softened tones of the chatter told him that the huge gathering was feeling well fed and mellow. Yet there was still the crisp bustle of the cook’s apprentices, busing their loaded trays from tent to tent, calling out the menu in a song of endless mouthwatering stanzas.
Beyond the music and conversation, he heard cheers and cries that brought a stab of homesickness with memories of summer afternoons and ball games in the local park. As he listened, a groan of disappointment surged through the distant spectators. Stavros pictured a great tidal wave sweeping fortunes in stone counters to the winds like so much sea foam. But the Sawls did not possess fortunes, only their own handmade goods and the promise of services, many of which would be traded back and forth by the time this Planting Feast was over.
Stavros grinned privately. Among his many concealments, there was one he continued for his own amusement alone. He had not been honest with Megan about the gambling. Any fool could see the Sawls were inveterate gamblers, that games of chance dominated substantial portions of their meager free time and that any issue open to question was fair game for a wager.
But what Megan saw as born out of boredom, greed and tradesmanship, he saw as a brave metaphor for the Sawls’ battle for survival on a hostile planet. If he proposed this interpretation to her, she’d just call him a romantic and think she had won the argument.
Their whole lives are a gamble… why shouldn’t they make light of it if they can?
The food and the cool tea steadied him. In addition to not sleeping, he had also forgotten to eat regularly during his seclusion. His fear of overload was ebbing. He decided to admit words to the data flow, and the conversation nearest him resolved itself out of former nonsense.
“When you were little and you saw programs on the vid about the Land of the Midnight Sun, didn’t you want to go there right away to find out how the Scand kids knew when it was bedtime?”
Susannah’s voice was husky with ease and memory. Stavros sensed a slippage inside him that he knew for a warning sign, but the light and the heat sapped his resistance. He tuned in to the sound of her. The wash of pleasure was greater than he had expected. She had been on his mind during the last few days, he deep in the caves, she out with the Planting. He was forced to admit that he had missed her.
Megan, by contrast, sounded forlorn, despite her answering chuckle. “Every time I called up one of those cultural shows, my mother would hang over my shoulder and editorialize. So I stopped watching. She always seemed to have better, fresher data than the journalists did.”
There was a small clatter, as of wooden objects tipp
ing over.
“Is that your move, Dr. Levy?” Weng’s voice held subtle mischief, and accompanied the clink of wooden objects being righted.
“Does it help to fondle the bishop like that?” Susannah rustled. He pictured her stirring, lying back perhaps.
“I wish it did,” replied Megan distractedly. Stavros heard a tentative clunk. “No, wait. There’s got to be a better move than that.”
“There are a number of them,” offered Weng mildly.
It was an easy guess who was winning, but Stavros wanted to watch it happen. He raised his head carefully. His eyes had stopped watering. He blinked and focused.
Weng and Megan sat upright on two red cushions as thick as little ottomans, for all the world like two colonial pashas at tea among the barbarians. A third pile of cushions set between them supported the chessboard. A quick survey told him that endgame was fast approaching. Megan sent her remaining rook halfway across the board with a defeated sigh.
“Liphar says the priests will dance later, in the fields.” She twisted sideways on her cushion. “He seemed particularly eager that we be there, Susannah.”
Cautiously, Stavros followed Megan’s gaze. Susannah reclined in a tumble of soft pillows at the far corner of his rug. Her head lolled back lazily. Her dark hair fanned out against the bright yellow, red and orange of the pillow fabric. She had shed her unwashed, useless therm-suit for a loose Sawl shift that the lender had not had a chance to lengthen. Stavros’s discovery of her knees and ankles was as disturbingly arousing to him as it would have been to a Victorian gentleman. It was as if he had never really seen her before. The sudden summer seemed to encourage a sensuousness in her that he had known only in his fantasies. Gauzy shadows played across her cheek. She stretched luxuriantly among the pillows. The arch of her back and her body’s unconscious preening tied knots in his gut. He had to look away.
He focused on the chess game, on the hot green-blue sky, on the food drying out in his dish. He remembered the papers at his side and felt for them blindly. Sandwiched between pages of rough hand translation and a sheaf of stills of the Dance of Origins were his secret photos of the StoryHall flame. He snatched up the papers and planted them in front of his nose. The blind face of Kav Daven smiled back at him from the top of the stack. His ardor cooled with the leaden weight of the secrets held in his hand that he could not share with her. She had disapproved of his running interference between Clausen and the Sawls. How would she feel about this?
Megan heard the crackle of his papers. “Put that work away, boy. Get over here and win this game for me!”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for rescue, Dr. Levy,” Weng assured her.
Megan sighed.
“Still working on the Dance of Origins translation?” Susannah asked him lazily.
“Mmmm.” Guilt and desire left him inarticulate.
“It might help to take a break, if you’re having trouble,” she suggested.
“Mmmm,” he muttered again. He heard her rustling among her pillows again and imagined himself among them with her.
“But if you insist on ignoring the most glorious weather that ever was,” she continued, “meant only for relaxing, there was something I wanted to check out with you.”
Stavros glanced up with what he hoped would read as polite interest and found he could not meet her eyes.
“Would you say that the words ‘hakra,’ ‘hekker’ and ‘hjalk’ are root-related in any way?” she asked.
Genuine interest offered him an anchor. He repeated the words experimentally in his head, then cleared his throat, fully expecting his voice to be as dysfunctional as the rest of him seemed to be. But speech was still within his grasp. “If similarity of sound were enough to go on, I’d say yes, but etymology is often less logical than that. Why do you ask?”
“Well, they’ve all got the same body, more or less, in three different sizes. Yet within the three, the range of size is minimal.”
Stavros nodded. “I’ll put a flag on it in the translator’s glossary. Part of the program searches possible roots and derivations. What’s your guess?”
Susannah sucked her cheek. “That they were all the same animal once. Which would suggest that the Sawls have been fiendishly clever at breeding for desired characteristics, for a very long time. These are not short-generation animals, these sturdy beasts. It would take a while to get them the way you wanted them.”
“Couldn’t they have evolved that way in the first place?”
She considered. “Possible. But not likely.”
A young Sawl wheeled in under their canopy, balancing a steaming tray on one shoulder. His gray apron bore the ubiquitous double red and blue stripes of the FoodGuild, topped by the thin yellow band of an apprentice cook. He greeted them cheerfully, spun the tray down and presented it to the chessplayers with a flourish.
Weng studied the food closely without appearing to, then pincered a small dumpling between delicate fingers. She rewarded the apprentice with a gracious nod and laid the dumpling beside the neat file of chessmen she had captured from Megan. A chunk of uneaten cheese and a thin roll shared this relegation to obscurity.
Stavros watched her fondly. That must be the sort of smile they used to teach queens to make. Weng’s children had children his age. He was grateful to be able to love her without confusion.
Megan looked the tray over and shook her head definitively, then as the apprentice turned away, she changed her mind and snatched a fat pastry off the edge of the tray. Susannah roused herself eagerly, reaching for her battered notebook to take the tray’s inventory. She pointed to a baked casserole and asked what it was.
The little cook smiled proudly and reeled off a list of ingredients. Susannah made a few rapid scrawls, then foundered. “Stav, are you listening? Translate, please?”
“Eggs, butter, three cheeses: kidri, voss and nahrin; those onionlike shoots, blue fungus, kamad root, you know, like a turnip, flat noodles, uh…” He still could not look her in the eye. Perhaps it was just the brightness of the light.
I’ve never had this problem before.
He asked the Sawl to repeat the end of his list. “The rest are mostly spices that I think you already have in your listings. And by the way, your asking made him very happy. That recipe is one of his own that the cooks are allowing him to try out during the Feast.”
Susannah scribbled frantically. “Kamad, noodles… jeez, writing by hand is slow!”
He chose to read subtle rebuke into her remark. “I’m working on that. Liphar tells me that some of the terracers found what’s left of the main antenna out in a gully.” His awkwardness with her made him talk too fast, sound too businesslike for a festive occasion. “Now that Planting’s done, they can help us haul it in and I’ll see what can be done about getting it pushed back into shape and mounted in a proper send-receive position. But that’ll take a while. First thing is to get the omni working again.”
She smiled a puzzled apology at him. “Stav, it’s all right. I didn’t mean…”
“Liphar also mentioned an old metalsmith in Engineers’ who might be able to help with the welds, if he can get his forge hot enough. He works in high-temp ceramics mostly but he also does all the repairs on metals in the Caves.”
Susannah laid her notebook aside and took a square of kamad casserole onto her platter. The apprentice went away beaming. “It’s all right, really,” she soothed. “I just get impatient sometimes. Actually I’m managing just fine without a computer, though I never thought I’d hear myself say it.”
Weng made a small noise that was not quite a grumble, and then looked embarrassed that she had let anything so inadvertent escape her. Megan laughed. “Maybe you’re doing okay, but I think the Commander misses her music. What is it now, Weng, two weeks’ worth of numbers playing around in your head that you haven’t been able to listen to yet?”
Weng’s embarrassment deepened. She pointed a thin finger at the chessboard. “If CRI were on line, Dr. Levy, you would no
t be so often required to allow me to lay your armies to waste.”
Megan swiveled back to stare at the board. “Is that what’s happening?”
Susannah chuckled mischievously. “Game theory has its practical applications, I see, Commander.”
Weng nodded. “An enlightening system of analysis, Dr. James.”
Other visitors followed the apprentice cook. Tyril stopped by to show off her baby, a plump five-month-old girl. After the women had cooed over it and let it grasp their fingers, Tyril invited them to visit her family’s canopy later, before the priests’ dance ended the celebration. As she left, Weng’s eyes followed the baby. She gave it a grandmotherly wave and went back to her chess game.
The Master Healer came along next, dressed still in his linen smock.
“Rhe khem, Suzhanna,” he murmured with a smile as he ducked under the canopy and folded his long legs beneath him on the rug.
“Khem rhe, Ghirra.” She offered a mug of cold tea, then made the introductions. Weng smiled. Megan became positively girlish. Stavros let his attention wander. The Sawl physician’s soft voice and stooping, gentle carriage did nothing to detract from his dark good looks, and Stavros did not like the way his long-fingered surgeon’s hands fluttered around Susannah as he praised her skill in the infirmary. He brought no wife or companion visiting with him, nor did it help Stavros’s pride that Ghirra was mastering English without the aid of the official Ship’s Linguist and Communications Officer. Stavros sucked at his lukewarm tea and watched his neighbors.
Under the adjacent canopy, a large and jovial group had been raising their mugs in semimusical unison, emptying endless trays of food. Leather dyers, he thought, looking at their hands. He recognized a woman who worked a stall in the MarketHall, trading exquisitely colored pouches and strapping. Now the more boisterous of this group rose and sauntered away to watch the games. Others drifted off to wander from canopy to canopy on the expected after-dinner rounds of socializing. A single couple remained, and as Stavros watched from the corner of his eye, they snuggled themselves among their pillows and began to make quiet love. Stavros nearly groaned aloud. Circumstances were conspiring to keep him from tranquillity. He decided it would be less painful to listen to Ghirra charming the ladies.
The Wave and the Flame Page 23
