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Sybil sat down on the bed’s edge to stare. “What are you going to do? Why give me this?”
“Shhh. Hide it.”
“Don’t give up, Consuelo. Just because you couldn’t escape from your brother’s house!”
“Don’t ask what I’m going to do. Only, Wednesday, tomorrow, be ready to run. There’ll be a lot of confusion in the afternoon, when the doctors see me. Run then. Run and never let them get you again!”
Valente paused, stood in the hallway looking in. Co
“I’m not. For me this is war. I got to fight it the only way I see. To stop them. Don’t ask me more.” Her voice stuck in her throat. “I wish you a good life, Sybil. Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”
Tuesday night, in spite of the sleeping pills she lay awake, her eyes wearing themselves raw on dim shapes. She tossed, she thrust her head into the pillow, she counted and tried to blank her mind. Her thoughts ran round and round like dogs trapped behind a fence, to and fro until they had worn a bald track in her head.
She tried to open her mind to Luciente. In weary boredom, in fear of the next day, wanting a little something nice, she tried. Her mind was rusted shut. It would not open. She pushed on herself, she tried and tried. Sweat stood out on her forehead, sweat gathered under her arms and under her breasts. Once she almost felt something, a presence. That made her go on battering her mind. She lay panting as if she had run up a flight of steps. Please, she begged, please! What had been so easy was hard and painful, hard as dying. Dying into distance. Where there had been only air, something solid stood, solid as bone, as prison walls. But she went on. What else did she have to do this night? What else but touch her fears like the beads of a cold, oily rosary, again and again. She went on trying.
Finally she felt a brush of presence, hard, hard and heavy. Yet she could tell almost at once that this time the pain was coming from Luciente. No, the pain was from the terrible effort. Luciente too strained toward her. Together at last they forced weak contact.
“I feared you were dead,” she thought at Luciente.
“I feared they had done something … final to you. Tried … many times!”
“Bring me over!”
Luciente tried for a long time. “Very hard … need help. A moment. I’ll call Diana or Parra or Zuli … . Wait!”
Finally, roughly, she stood shaking in the meetinghouse. As on the nights of the feast and of Jackrabbit’s wake, many people circulated, but dressed now in ordinary clothes. Their voices were subdued.
Luciente hugged her tight. “How long! We missed you ru
“Yourself? How did you get out of the burning floater?”
“What?”
“At the front. With Hawk.”
Luciente peered into her face. “I don’t comprend. Hawk’s over there.” She pointed. “What stew is this of floaters and fronts?”
“We weren’t together at the front? Fighting?”
“Not in my life, Co
“Pues … never mind. It felt so real … . How are you, Luciente?”
“I feel in you some large resolve. You plan some action?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, please. Just tell me about yourself. Bee. Dawn. How you are.”
“The Shaping controversy builds. I think we’ll call a grandcil this March to decide it. I’ve been arguing myself empty. It’s one choice to breed carrots for our uses–especially leaving wild and variant gene pools intact. Is another to breed ourselves for some uses or imagined uses! For all we know, a new ice age comes and we might better breed for furriness than mathematical ability! I speechify! Pass it.” Luciente hugged her again. “I feared never to see you. Hard bringing you over. We’re fading contact.”
“How is Bee?”
“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.”
“He’s teaching a class?”
“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games … . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Co
“Is this a feast?” She stared at the people wandering through the room and out into the square, stopping to examine objects laid out, watching holies, arguing over graphs and exhibits.
“No, no, a memorial. Nothing to celebrate, fasure. In winter we make time for studying, communing. Often villages send out a traveling group who go around till they get worn with being on the road … . We’ve been chewing on–Bee, Otter, White Oak, me–going around with a skit on Shaping. This troupe is from Garibaldi on Mystic, where they make pasta, computer poppers, and breed grapevines. A beautiful place, Otter says. When person was eighteen, stayed a month during harvest working and coupling with Vittorio, who’s with the troupe. Otter is crazy with pleasure to see per again … .” They were strolling among the booths, hand in hand. Bee was using a very small holi projector which produced one moment a box of a children’s breakfast cereal from her own time called Sweetee Pyes and the next an image of braceros picking lettuce. He looked at once so serious, frowning at the Sweetee Pyes and rumbling deep in his chest, and at the same time so fine, with the delicate tattoo of the bee rippling on his arm, she lost track of what Luciente was telling her.
Hawk came dodging toward them. She greeted Co
Luciente put her hands on Hawk’s slight shoulders. “Do they agree?”
Hawk quivered with excitement. “They say we can learn the parts of two people who want to go home. I’ll learn Italian and get to see villages, and when I find one that warms me, I’ll stay on and work.”
“When do you go?”
“Thursday morning. Tomorrow they’re doing an opera. They say I sing well enough for the chorus, if I start working on the music.”
Co
“By dipper. Then, when we’re further south, by bike.”
“Do you own a bike?”
“Own? Like I dropped a rock on my own foot?”
“A bike that’s yours.”
Hawk scratched her ear. “Any bike not in use, I can use. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to everybody!” Hawk stood on one foot. “You think Bee would like my painting of per? It’s not … top good, but it has a lot of colors in it.”
“How not?” Luciente kissed her cheek. “If person should be so blind as not to want it, I want it.”
“I’m in velvet we’re done with taboo so I can say goodbye properly to my mothers … . Don’t tell Bee I’m going–I want to tell myself, hold?”
“Hold” Luciente shook her hand and Hawk skipped off.
“I love winter,” Luciente said as they strolled on. “Eating and getting fat and going tobogganing and ice skimming. Talking and talking and talking. I’m redding Chinese, sweetness, fifteen hours a week till even Bee picks up from hearing it so much. Also our base, we’re monitoring last year’s results from all over. And I play in a new mojai group every Friday night, last Friday we went on almost till morning. Mojai is music like this … .” Luciente began beating out a complicated rhythm over rhythm with two hands on the edge of a table.