She held her baby close against her, his face to her breast.
People were there with her, beside her, clinging to the wall, but she was only vaguely aware of them, even though they were all huddled close together they all seemed apart and distant. She heard people gasping, vomiting. She was dizzy and sick. She could not breathe. The ventilation was failing, the fans were far too strong. Turn down the fans! A spotlight shone down on her, she could feel the heat of it on her head and neck, see the glare of it in the skin of the wall when she opened her eyes.
The skin of the wall, the ship’s epidermis. She was doing eva. That was all. She always wanted to be an evaman when she was little. She was doing eva. When it was done she could go back into the world. She tried to hold on to the skin of the world but it was smooth ceramic and would not let her hold it. Cold mother, hard mother, dead mother.
She opened her eyes again and looked down past Alejo’s silky black head at her feet and saw her feet standing in dirt. She moved, then, to get out of the dirt, because you shouldn’t walk in dirt. Father had told her when she was very young, no, it’s not good to walk in the dirt gardens, the plants need all the room, and your feet might hurt the little plants. So she moved away from the wall to move out of the dirt garden. But there was only dirt garden, dirt, plants, everywhere, wherever she put her feet. Her feet hurt the plants and the dirt hurt the soles of her feet. She looked despairingly for a walkway, a corridor, a ceiling, walls, looked away from the wall and saw a great whirl of green and blue spin round a center of intolerable light. Blinded and unbalanced she fell to her knees and hid her face beside the baby’s face. She wept in shame.
WIND, AIR MOVING FAST, HARD, endlessly blowing, making you cold, so you shivered, shuddered, like having a fever, the wind stopping and starting, restless, stupid, unpredictable, unreasonable, maddening, hateful, a torment. Turn it off, make it stop!
Wind, air moving softly, moving slender grasses in waves over the hills, carrying odors from a long way off, so you lifted your head and sniffed, breathed it in, the strange, sweet, bitter smell of the world.
The sound of wind in a forest.
Wind that moved colors in the air.
PEOPLE WHO HAD NEVER BEEN of much account became prominent, respected, constantly in demand. 4-Nova Ed was good with the tenses. He was the first to figure out how to deploy them properly. Miraculously the shambles of plasticloth and cords rose and became walls, walls to shut out the wind—became rooms, rooms to enclose you in the marvelous familiarity of surfaces close by, a ceiling close overhead, a floor smooth underfoot, quiet air, an even, unblinding light. It made all the difference, it made life livable, to have a tense, to have a homespace, to know you could go in, be in, be inside.
“It’s ‘tent,’” Ed said, but people had heard the more familiar word and went on calling them tense, tenses.
A fifteen-year-old girl, Lee Meili, remembered from an ancient movie what foot coverings were called. People had tried syndrome-sox, those that had them, but they were thin and wore out at once. She hunted through the Stockpile, the immense and growing labyrinth of stores that the landers kept bringing down from the ship, till she found crates labelled SHOES. The shoes hurt the delicate-skinned feet of people who had gone barefoot on carpet all their lives, but they hurt less than the floor here did. The ground. The stones. The rocks.
But 4-Patel Ramdas, whose skills had put Discovery into orbit and guided the first lander from ship to surface, stood with a reading lamp in one hand, its cord and plug in the other, staring at the dark wrinkled wall-like surface of a huge plant, the tree under which he had set up his tense. He was looking for an electrical outlet. His gaze was vague and sad. Presently he straightened up; his expression became scornful. He walked back to the Stockpile with the lamp.
5-Lung Tirza’s three-month-old baby lay in the starlight while Tirza worked on construction. When she came to feed him she shrieked, “He’s blind!” The pupils of his eyes were tiny dots. He was red with fever. His face and scalp blistered. He had convulsions, went into coma. He died that night. They had to recycle him in the dirt. Tirza lay on the place in the dirt where the baby was lying inside it, underneath her. She moaned with her mouth against the dirt. Moaning aloud, she raised her face with brown wet dirt all over it, a terrible face made of dirt.
NOT STAR: SUN. STARLIGHT WE know: safe, kind, distant. Sun is a star too close. This one.
My name is Star, Hsing said in her mind. Star, not Sun.
She made herself look out of her tense in darkcycle to see the safe, kind, distant stars who had given her her name. Shining stars, bing hsing. Tiny bright dots. Many, many, many. Not one. But each . . . Her thoughts would not hold. She was so tired. The immensity of the sky, the uncountability of the stars. She crawled back into inside. Inside the tense, inside the bagbed beside Luis. He lay in the moveless sleep of exhaustion. She listened automatically to his breathing for a moment; soft, unlabored. She drew Alejo into her arms, against her breasts. She thought of Tirza’s baby inside the dirt. Inside the dirtball.
She thought of Alejo running across the grass the way he had today, running in the sunlight, shouting for the joy of running. She had hurried to call him back into the shade. But he loved the warmth of sunlight.
LUIS HAD LEFT HIS ASTHMA on the ship, he said, but his migraines were bad sometimes. Many people had headaches, sinus pain. Possibly it was caused by particles in the air, particles of dirt, plants’ pollens, substances and secretions of the planet, its outbreath. He lay in his tense in the long heat of the day, in the long ebb of the pain, thinking about the secrets of the planet, imagining the planet breathing out and himself breathing in that outbreath, like a lover, like breathing in Hsing’s breath. Taking it in, drinking it in. Becoming it.
UP HERE ON THE HILLSIDE, looking down on the river but not close to it, had seemed a good place for the settlement, a safe distance, so that children would not be falling into the huge, fiercely rushing, deep mass of water. Ramdas measured the distance and said it was 1.7 kilos. People who carried water discovered a different definition of distance: 1.7 kilos was a long distance to carry water. Water had to be carried. There were no pipes in the ground, no faucets in the rocks. And when there were no pipes and faucets you discovered that water was necessary, constantly, imperatively necessary. Was wonderful, worshipful, a blessing, a bliss the angels had never dreamed of. You discovered thirst. To drink when you were thirsty! And to wash—to be clean! To be as you’d always been, not grainy-skinned and gritty and sticky with smears of dirt, but clean!
Hsing walked back from the fields with her father. Yao walked a little stooped. His hands were blackened, cracked, ingrained with dirt. She remembered how when he worked in the dirt gardens of the ship that fine soft dirt had clung to his fingers, lined his knuckles and fingernails, just while he was working; then he washed his hands and they were clean.
To be able to wash when you were dirty, to have enough to drink all the time, what a wonderful thing. At Meeting they voted to move the tenses closer to the river, farther from the Stockpile. Water was more important than things. The children must learn to be careful.
Everybody must learn to be careful, everywhere, all the time.
Strain the water, boil the water. What a bother. But the doctors with their cultures were unyielding. Some of the native bacteria flourished in media made with human secretions. Infection was possible.
Dig latrines, dig cesspools, what hard work, what a bother. But the doctors with their manuals were unyielding. The manual on cesspools and septic tanks (printed in English in New Delhi two centuries ago) was hard to understand, full of words that had to be figured out by context: drainage, gravel, bedrock, seep.
A bother, being careful, taking care, taking trouble, following the rules. Never! Always! Remember! Don’t! Don’t forget! Or else!
Or else what?
You died anyway. This world hated you. It hated foreign bodies.
Three babies now, an adolescent, two adults.
All under the dirt in that place, close to the little first death, Tirza’s baby, their guide to the underground. To the inside.
THERE WAS PLENTY TO EAT. When you looked at the food section of the Stockpile, the huge walls and corridors of crates, it seemed it must be all the food a thousand people could eat forever, and the angels’ generosity in letting them have it all seemed overwhelming. Then you saw the way the land went on and on, past the Stockpile, past the new sheds, and the sky went on and on over them; and when you looked back the pile of crates looked very small.
You listened to Liu Yao saying in Meeting, “We must continue to test the native plants for edibility,” and Chowdry Arvind saying, “We should be making gardens now, while the time of the revolu—of the year is the most advantageous time—the growing season.”
You came to see that there was not plenty to eat. That there might not ever be plenty to eat. That (the beans did not flower, the rice did not come up out of the dirt, the genetic experiment did not succeed) there might not be enough to eat. In time. Time was not the same here.
Here, to every thing there was a season.
5-NOVA LUIS, A DOCTOR, SAT beside the body of 5-Chang Berto, a soil technician, who had died of blood poisoning from a blister on his heel. The doctor suddenly shouted at Berto’s tense-mates, “He neglected it! You neglected him! You could see that it was infected! How could you let this happen? Do you think we’re in a sterile environment? Don’t you listen? Can’t you understand that the dirt here is dangerous. Do you think I can work miracles?” Then he began to cry, and Berto’s tense-mates all stood there with their dead companion and the weeping doctor, dumb with fear and shame and sorrow.
CREATURES. THERE WERE CREATURES EVERYWHERE. This world was made of creatures. The only things not alive were the rocks. Everything else was alive with creatures.
Plants covered the dirt, filled the waters, endless variety and number of plants (4-Liu Yao working in the makeshift plant test lab felt sometimes through the mist of exhaustion an incredulous delight, a sense of endless wealth, a desire to shout aloud—Look! Look at this! How extraordinary!)—and of animals, endless variety and number of animals (4-Steinman Jael, one of the first to sign up as an Outsider, had to go back permanently to the ship, driven into fits of shuddering and screaming by the continual sight and touch of the innumerable tiny crawling and flying creatures on the ground and in the air, and her uncontrollable fear of seeing them and being touched by them).
People were inclined at first to call the creatures cows, dogs, lions, remembering words from Earth books and holos. Those who read the manuals insisted that all the Shindychew creatures were much smaller than cows, dogs, lions, and were far more like what they called insects, arachnids, and worms on Dichew. “Nobody here has invented the backbone,” said young Garcia Anita, who was fascinated by the creatures, and studied the Earth Biology archives whenever her work as an electrical engineer left her time to do so. “At least nobody in this part of the world. But they certainly have invented wonderful shells.”
The creatures about a millimeter long with green wings that followed people about persistently and liked to walk on your skin, tickling slightly, got called dogs. They acted friendly, and dogs were supposed to be man’s best friend. Anita said they liked the salt in human sweat, and weren’t intelligent enough to be friendly, but people went on calling them dogs. Ach! what’s that on my neck? Oh, it’s just a dog.
THE PLANET REVOLVED AROUND THE star.
But at evening, the sun set. The same thing, but a different matter. With it as it set the sun took colors, colors of clouds moved through air by wind.
At daybreak the sun rose, bringing with it all the mutable, fierce, subtle colors of the world, restored, brought back to life, reborn.
Continuity here did not depend on human beings. Though they might depend on it. It was a different matter.
THE SHIP HAD GONE ON. It was gone.
Outsiders who had changed their minds about living outside had mostly gone back up in the first few tendays. When the Plenary Council, now chaired by the Archangel 5-Ross Minh, announced that Discovery would leave orbit on Day 256, Year 164, a number of people in the Settlement asked to be taken back to the ship, unable to endure the finality of permanent exile, or the painful realities of life outside. About as many shipsiders asked to join the Settlement, unable to accept the futility of an endless pilgrimage, or the government of the archangels.
When the ship left, the nine hundred and four people on the planet had chosen to be there. To die there. Some of them had already died there.
They talked about it very little. There wasn’t a lot to say, and when you were tired all the time all you wanted was to eat and get into your bedbag and sleep. It had seemed like a big event, the ship going on, but it wasn’t. They couldn’t see it from the ground anyway. For days and days before the leaving date the radios and the hooknet carried a lot of talk about the journey into bliss, and exhortations telling the people on the ground that they were still all angels and were welcome back to joy. Then there was a flurry of personal messages, pleadings, blessings, goodbyes, and then the ship was gone.
For a long time Discovery kept sending news and messages to the Settlement, births, deaths, sermons, prayers, and reports of the unanimous joyfulness of the voyage. Personal messages went back to the ship from the Settlement, along with the same informational and scientific reports that were sent to Earth. Attempts at dialogue, at response, rarely successful, were mostly abandoned after a few years.
Obeying the mandates of the Constitution, the Settlers collected and organised the information they gathered concerning Shindychew and sent it to the planet of origin as often as the work of survival allowed them time to do so. A committee worked on keeping and transmitting methodical annals of the Settlement. People also sent observations and thoughts, images, poems.
You couldn’t help wondering if anyone would listen to them. But that was nothing new.
Transmissions intended for the ship continued to come in to the receivers in the Settlement, since the people on Dichew wouldn’t hear about the early arrival for years to come, and then their response would take years to arrive. The transmissions continued to be as confusing as ever, almost entirely irrelevant, and increasingly difficult to understand, due to changes in thought and vocabulary. What was a withheld E.O. and why had there been riots about it in Milak? What was faring technology? Why were they saying that it was essential to know about the 4:10 ratio in pankogenes?
The vocabulary problem was nothing new, either. All your life inside the ship you had known words that had no meaning at all. Words that signified nothing in the world. Words such as cloud, wind, rain, weather. Poets’ words, explained in notes at the foot of the page, or that found a brief visual equivalent in films, sometimes a brief sensory equivalent in VRs. Words whose reality was imaginary, or virtual.
But here, the word that had no meaning, the concept without content, was the word virtual. Here nothing was virtual.
Clouds came over from the west. West, another reality: direction: a crucially important reality in a world you could get lost in.
Rain fell out of a certain kind of cloud, and the rain wet you, you were wet, the wind blew and you were cold, and it went on and didn’t stop because it wasn’t a program, it was the weather. It went on being. But you didn’t, unless you acquired the sense to come in out of the rain.
Probably people on Earth already knew that.
The big, thick, tall plants, the trees, consisted largely of the very rare and precious substance wood, the material of certain instruments and ornaments ontheship. (One word: ontheship.) Wood objects had seldom been recycled, because they were irreplaceable; plastic copies were quite different in quality. Here plastic was rare and precious, but wood stood around all over the hills and valleys. With peculiar, ancient tools provided in the Landing Stock, fallen trees could be cut into pieces. (The meaning of the word chensa, spelled chainsaw in the manuals, was rediscovered.) All t
he pieces of tree were solid wood: an excellent material for building with, which could also be shaped into all kinds of useful devices. And wood could be set fire to, to create warmth.
This discovery of enormous importance, would it be news on Earth?
Fire. The stuff at the end of a welding torch. The active point in a bunsenburner.
Most people had never seen a fire burning. They gathered to it. Don’t touch! But the air was cold now, full of cloud and wind, full of weather. Fire-warmth felt good. Lung Jo, who had set up the Settlement’s first generator, gathered bits of tree and piled them inside his tense and set fire to them and invited his buddies to come get warm. Presently everybody poured out of the tense coughing and choking, which was fortunate, because the fire liked the tense as well as it liked the wood, and ate with its red and yellow tongues till nothing was left but a black stinking mess in the rain. A disaster. (Another disaster.) All the same, it was funny when they all rushed out weeping and coughing in a cloud of smoke.
Cloud. Smoke. Words full, crammed, jammed with meaning, with meanings. Life-and-death meanings, signifying life, signifying death. The poets had not been talking virtually, after all.
I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .
What is the weather in a beard?
It’s windy there and rather weird . . .
THE 0-2 STRAIN OF OATS came up out of the dirt, sprang up (spring), shot up, put out leaves and beautiful hanging grain-heads, was green, was yellow, was harvested. The seeds flowed between your fingers like polished beads, fell (fall) back into the heap of precious food.
ABRUPTLY, THE MATERIAL RECEIVED FROM the ship ceased to contain any personal messages or information, consisting of rebroadcasts of the three recorded talks given by Kim Terry, talks by Patel Inbliss, sermons by various archangels, and a recording of a male choir chanting, played over and over.
“WHY AM I SIX LO Meiling?”
When the child understood her mother’s explanation, she said, “But that was ontheship. We live here. Aren’t we all Zeroes?”
The Found and the Lost Page 80
