by Emma Bull
I couldn’t do it. The ring on his left hand reminded me of the wife I’d never met. Some skill of his in the sickroom made me wonder whether he’d acquired it during his apprenticeship. A row of flowers outside the window reminded me of him in negative. There was a slow corruption of my principles going on, that I could feel, but that I was helpless to stop.
He never mentioned what he knew about me, which I didn’t understand at all. He’d examined me when Sher brought me in, and he knew I was aware of that. That part of the wall of my privacy was already torn down. Yet he never raised the subject, as if it were still private, as if we were on opposite sides of that wall. What value did he think the knowledge had, when both of us possessed it?
Theo came to visit me several times. I found I almost couldn’t talk to him. I remembered sitting in his room in China Black’s house, feeling as if we were the only people in the world who understood the language we were speaking that day. We had traded secrets and painful admissions in that language. Now, looking at him, I felt as if someone had plucked the whole vocabulary out of my brain. I didn’t think it had had any words for explaining what had happened to me, anyway. Theo looked hurt when the conversation faltered. After a while he stopped visiting.
When I could walk that far, I took to sitting on the front porch of the farmhouse. There was enough to see from there to keep my mind busy and out of trouble, and when there wasn’t, I usually dozed off.
The front porch looked out on a makeshift village square with the corners filed off. It had one large tree at the center, and a scattering of smaller ones. There was a pump and a trough, and a few benches, and a charred brick firepit. There were also flowers — less thickly planted than in China Black’s garden, and less disciplined, but with something of the same feel nonetheless. It was pretty, and there was almost always something to watch: someone doing something to a flowerbed, or pumping water, or rocking a baby.
Other houses surrounded the square, in a confusion of styles and sizes. Some had been built there, some moved there from other places. Behind the first ring of houses, partially visible from my chair, was another. These, too, were a confetti of styles and materials, including cloth-and-tubing domes and some complex-looking tents. I put the number of dwellings I could see at about two dozen. If there was anything beyond those, I didn’t think about it.
One afternoon Sherrea came and sat with me. She’d been a regular visitor to the sickroom. More than that, she’d been an irregular volunteer nurse there, since her hands, for no clear reason, were among the few I could tolerate for the relatively impersonal services. But our conversations there had been short, and had brushed lightly over their subject matter.
Now she greeted me and sat on the porch floor at my feet, her arms wrapped around her knees and a half-empty mug in one hand. I could smell the tea, but I wasn’t sure what kind it was. The undisciplined mass of her dark hair dwarfed her sharp-featured little face. She wore a huge, busy-patterned cotton tunic bound with three different sashes around her hips, black leggings with holes in both knees, and sneakers with the toes cut out. It was all a concession to country life; none of it trailed behind her, after all.
I hadn’t realized that we’d been sitting in silence until Sherrea said, “Did you take a vow not to ask questions, or what?”
“Huh?”
“Oh, that’s a question. Don’t you want to know where you are, or who these people are, or why I brought you here, or anything!”
“Sure, if you want to tell me.”
She set her chin on her knees and stared at me. “What happened to your head, Sparrow?” she said. “What’s going on in there, that nothing comes out anymore? Or is there nothing to come out?”
“My head’s fine.” A thought shot to the surface: I know; I’ve met it. But it was gone before I got a good look at it.
“It is not. You never used to tell anybody anything, but at least you had a personality. Now you’re even locked that up. I’m your friend, you idiot! You can be rude to me!”
I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. It was a hot day, and a damp one, and inhaling was like breathing soup. “I don’t have anything to be rude to you about. And if I’ve locked anything up, it’s more than I know.”
She sighed. “Maybe that’s true. Maybe you don’t know you’ve done it. In which case, you did it because some part of you had to. In which case, you have an even screwier sense of personal property than I thought you did.”
“That’s a non sequitur,” I said, smiling.
“The hell it is. What do you think you own?”
Sweat trickled under my shirt, cold as ice water. “Nothing.”
After a moment she said, “That’s what I mean. You own exactly what everybody else owns. Your body, for starts. Nobody can make any claims on it but you. You can choose to give control of it to somebody else, temporarily, like you did back in the City. Which, by the way, took more guts than sense. But it took a lot of guts. But when that’s over, your body’s still yours, you haven’t given a bit of it away.
“And you own your mind. Everything you think is your property, and it’s yours whether you build a fence around it or not. Nobody can cross into it, nobody can make you change anything in it, and nobody can hurt you there, unless you let them. Whatever Beano did to your body, he bounced clean off your mind and didn’t even leave a dent. Unless you put him inside the property line yourself.”
I’d opened my eyes, and was looking at the porch ceiling. “You should bring all this up with Frances. A Horseman’s perspective is probably a little different.”
“I did bring it up with Frances,” Sher said caustically. “I thought somebody ought to. Funny thing is, she agrees with me. According to Frances, her victims’ minds are bulletproof. She can replay their memories, but those are just recordings. They’re not the person, they’re just what the person draws on sometimes. She says if she wanted to make someone hate blue, or like rhubarb, or want to shoot the dog, she couldn’t do it. She can kill minds, but she can’t change ’em.”
“But she can steal bodies. That’s hard on the first part of your theory.”
“And I could strangle you dead, right this minute. That would be stealing, too. I’ll give you half an exception for the Horsemen, but after that I’ll say it again: They can kill ya, but they can’t own ya. And until you’re dead, you belong to you and nobody can change that. You don’t have to lock your brain in a box to be sure of it.”
She stopped, and I dropped my gaze from the ceiling to her face. “Okay,” I said.
She threw her mug at the lawn and stomped off the porch.
As my endurance came back, and my flexibility, I began to walk instead of sit. Outside the second ring of houses (my estimate had been low; there were thirty-nine), I found barns and sheds and stables and workshops. Beyond those were pastureland and cultivated fields. Grain did its foot-rooted wind dance there; corn thrashed its jungle leaves; beans waggled long green or purple or yellow fingers; summer squash ripened furiously in a pinwheel of tropical-looking vegetation. Here, too, there were always people, cultivating, hoeing weeds, spreading things, raking things, trimming, harvesting. It all seemed as ritual as a pre-Bang Catholic mass, and as intelligible to outsiders.
One morning, when I’d gone farther than I had before and was feeling the effects, I sat down in the shade of a tree next to a field. Five people were hoeing up and down the rows of something I didn’t recognize. One of them reached the end of the row nearest me, looked up, smiled, and came over.
“Hi,” she said, dropping down onto the grass. “Sparrow, isn’t it? I’m Kris.” She pulled her straw hat off to reveal a brush of hair the color of the hat. She tugged a bandanna out of her pocket and wiped her face with it; then she undipped a flask from her belt and poured some of the contents over the bandanna. She draped that over her head like a veil and jammed the hat back on. “Funny-looking,” she said with a grin, when she saw me watching the process. “But it does the trick. The evaporating
water keeps your head cool.”
“Looks like hard work,” I said, nodding back out into the sun.
“Goddess, it is. Especially this part of the year. Harvesting isn’t any easier, but it’s more fun, and you have something to show for it right away. Every year about now I start wishing it was winter.”
This was a reasonable line of conversation, not too personal. “What is that out there?”
“Sugar beets. We voted to do ’em this year instead of tobacco, thank Goddess. Don’t get me wrong — I love to smoke. But I’ll pay for my tobacco and be glad to. It’s a good cash crop, but the hand labor is murder, and no matter how careful we are, we always have trouble with the tomatoes when we grow it. Turns out we’ll make as much on the beets, anyway, so I can afford to buy my smokes.”
“Oh,” I said. Every word of that speech had made perfect sense, but I still wasn’t sure what had gone on.
Her grin broke out again. “That’s right, Sher said you were strictly a City-dweller. And we were supposed to be patient when you walked through the basil and fell in the flowerbeds.”
“You’ve been lucky so far. The state I’ve been in, the flowerbeds could have fought me off.”
“Yeah. What does Josh say, are you doing all right?”
My own fault; I’d introduced the subject. “Fine.” I stood up. “I should be getting back, I think.”
“Me, too — back to swingin’ dat hoe. Ugh. You coming to the whoop tonight?”
“Whoop?”
“We’ve never figured out a better name for it. In the town circle. There’ll be some drumming and dancing and singing and shouting, and food, and a bonfire… what can I say? A whoop.”
“I don’t think I’m quite up to dancing.”
She flashed white teeth. “We’ll pretend you’re an ancestor. Sit by the fire and we’ll feed you and ask which song you want to hear next.”
“I’ll see,” I said.
I didn’t think I’d be there. But when I got back to the farmhouse, I found the kitchen in a state of cheerful uproar, and the inhabitants united on the question of where I was going to spend my evening.
“Better take it easy if you don’t want to wear out before the whoop,” said Mags, who was poking holes in a piecrust. She was a plump, wide-eyed, snub-nosed Latina. I would have thought she was about sixteen, if Josh hadn’t told me that her son was twelve. The son, Paulo, was shelling beans at the table. He was tall for his age, dark and thin, and stared at me solemnly every time I appeared.
“That’s all right. I thought I’d stay here.”
“Don’t be a dink. You can’t stay here, and if you did, you wouldn’t have any peace, anyway. Everybody goes who’s not actually dying. If you stay away, they’ll think you’ve got leprosy. Paulo, put those in to boil, gallito. Oh, and slice those peppers into rings for me, please.”
“She’s right,” Josh called, from somewhere beyond the screen door. “You want them to think I did my best, and failed?” He pulled the screen door open and let it bang behind him. His head and shoulders were wet from the pump, and he carried a tub of butter. “As long as you don’t polka, you’ll be fine.”
Their cheerfulness was oppressive. Their assumption that there was nothing that made me different from anyone else in the place except, possibly, my injuries, was alarming. “Nobody will mind,” I said. “I’m not really part of the community.”
Josh turned his head to one side and looked at me, as if he were trying to read me like a thermometer. Then he set the tub down, pulled a stack of flat-bottomed bowls from a shelf, and began to fill them with butter. “If you say you’re not,” he said, “then you’re not. And no one will insist otherwise. But there’s a difference, you know, between being a member of the community and acknowledging that you’re part of that community’s shared experience.
“I know this will sound crazy to you, but showing up tonight — even for a little while — and eating our food and sharing our fire will be taken as an expression of gratitude. No one insists that you be grateful, either, but it would be a nice gesture.”
“I am grateful,” I said, feeling a stirring of distress. “You saved my life.”
Josh’s hands paused over the butter. He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, closed it again, then said, “No, never mind. The wrong lecture at the wrong time. Will you come tonight?”
I tried to imagine what I was committing myself to. Would it be more like lunch at China Black’s house, or like the Night Fair? Either one seemed, suddenly, equally frightening. “I’ll come,” I said, because I knew I had to.
“Good,” Mags said. “Then put these in the oven for me, will you? Put a tray under them or they’ll dribble all over. Josh, you better bring those clothes in off the line.”
I took Mags’s advice and lay down in the back bedroom that had changed from the sickroom to Sparrow’s room in the household language. I wondered what would happen if another invalid turned up.
The shadows were long and the sunlight deep gold when someone knocked on my door. I opened it to Mags, who pushed a folded pile of clothes into my arms.
“I just remembered, you don’t have much variety in your wardrobe. You can wear these tonight. Actually, you can keep ’em. Large Bob said the only way he was ever gonna fit in those pants again was if he stopped eating entirely.”
“I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. Say thank you and close the door.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Very much.”
I set the stack on the bed and looked at it. I didn’t mean to keep them, but I didn’t see how I could avoid wearing them tonight. It was a pity; the things I had on were Josh’s, which meant they were huge and had been washed and worn until they were soft as flannel. I didn’t look forward to clothes that hurt. I shook out the first thing on the pile.
It was a pair of black trousers with a stretchy drawstring waist and pleats at the top, made of brushed cotton twill. Underneath them was a cotton shirt, in a style I’d seen the interesting Indians wear in movies. It had an open collar and a low yoke, and wide sleeves gathered into cuffs. The shirt was wine-red, and the buttons on the cuffs and down the front were silver. It looked festive but restrained, and the whole business, once I put them on, felt as if I were proposing to go out in pajamas. Mags had understood about clothes that hurt.
I wish these people would stop understanding everything, I thought irritably. Something in my throat hurt, but I swallowed, and it went away.
The village square — excuse, the circle — was illuminated with lanterns hanging from all the lower tree branches, clusters of torch candles around the plank tables, and the bonfire. It sent almost enough light through the front windows to read by. I went to the kitchen and out the back door, and stood leaning on a porch pillar in the dark half of the night.
“Scared?” said Josh. I hadn’t seen him sitting on the steps.
“I… Yes, actually.”
“Sher said you weren’t a social animal.”
My hands opened and closed on nothing. Words pushed their way out of my mouth, unbidden and unwelcome. “Maybe I am, and there just aren’t any other animals like me.”
“What kind of animal do you think you are?” Josh asked, sounding mildly surprised.
I inhaled with my teeth closed. It made a hiss. “You know,” I whispered.
“What you think you are? Nope. I know what I think you are.”
“And what’s that?”
“A customized human being.”
“Well,” I said. “That was easy.”
Josh stood. I was on the porch and he was on the ground; he had to look up to meet my eyes. “It is easy,” he said. “Identity magic is the oldest and easiest kind there is. It’s what language is for.”
“Anybody gonna help carry this stuff?” Mags yelled from the kitchen, with volume enough to be heard inside and out.
“Damn,” said Josh; then, loudly, “You betcha!” He thumped up the porch stairs, past me, and into the kitchen.
<
br /> Paulo and I each had charge of a pie. Josh got the beanpot, swathed in toweling. We tramped across the lawn to the sawhorse tables, and put our contributions down next to everything else.
People smiled at me, and waved, and introduced themselves. It was like China Black’s and the Night Fair both. I couldn’t decide if it was the worst of both or not. The people who introduced themselves often told me how long they’d known Sherrea, or how they came to know her, or asked me how I had. Sher, it seemed, was universally acquainted around here. It was the first time I’d thought to wonder how she came to know about this place, and what it was to her. I was very polite to everyone.
I wandered toward the bonfire, wishing I knew how long I ought to stay. Then a flash of light on a face at the corner of my vision startled me, and I turned to look.
Theo was walking next to me, and the light had been glancing off his glasses. “Hey,” he said.
I stopped walking. I’d been talking to strangers all evening; I could do this. I had only to gather my much-tried manners and put them to work again. “Hello. How are they treating you?”
“Great. I think. Only there’s nothing to do. I keep thinking about whether Robby’s surviving without us.”
Ignore the strange feeling in the stomach; rely on the manners. “I expect so. And you’ll be able to go back soon, won’t you?”
“To what?” Theo asked. “Occupation under Tom Worecski?”
I frowned. “But that’s what it was before you came here.”
“It’s not — never mind. Look, I’m gonna ask somebody tomorrow if there’s anything electronic they want done around here. D’you want me to volunteer you, too?”
“No.” I almost turned and left, but I remembered: manners. “No, thank you. I’m not doing that anymore.” Then I left.
Tom Worecski had had the archives burned. That had damaged that part of me, but it hadn’t killed it. Something else had done that, something I couldn’t name, that had seared away the connection between who I was and what I knew. I still knew electronics, I still had languages and language, all the things I’d woken with out of that parody of birth fifteen years ago. But they didn’t belong to me. Nothing, I’d said to Sher. I owned nothing. My body was on lease from the past, a machine I’d rented and lost the paperwork for, and I had no idea where my mind had come from. All the things I knew might have been stolen from someone else.
