The Breath of Suspension (29 page)

The oldest things Tessa could see in the high-tension ceramic matrix of the Wolholme ward’s base could not have been much more than a century old, more than two centuries younger than the initial settlements on Koola: an enamel portrait of a woman holding a child, a man’s bronzed sun hat, and another pair of pruning shears, these with long curved blades.

“Ah, Theresa.” Though heavy, Dalka could move quietly when she had a mind to. She sat down next to Tessa and dropped her bag. “Now we can get to business.” She paused, and frowned. “Why are you wasting so much thread on those rear buttons?”

“Benjamin catches them on trellises and rips them off.” Tessa was deliberately patient with Dalka’s interference even in trifles. She hoped Dalka noticed. “He likes to climb.”

“We all do, when we’re young. Well, even when we’re not. At least that foolish city school Sora insisted on sending you to hasn’t ruined you completely for real life.”

Tessa felt the power and oppression of village life settling over her like a weighted bird net. “Momma had good reasons for sending me there. If the Wolholmes are to survive—”

“If the Wolholmes are to survive, dear, you’re going to have to see to it. Sora, poor dear, married for love.”

“Careful, Dalka.” To her surprise, Tessa found herself on the verge of losing her temper. She carefully folded Benjamin’s coveralls.

“Now, now.” Dalka chuckled. “I’m not attacking poor Perin, darling. But you have more responsibilities than a lady should, and less help in carrying them out.” She pulled something from her bag and held it out to Tessa. “Recognize this?”

“People call them judeflowers.” Tessa looked at the bundled leaves and petals and remembered both her mother’s lessons and her botany class at Hammerswick, though reconciling the two was sometimes difficult. “It has a false stem that’s actually fused bracts.” She raised her eyebrows.

“Goodness, what a clever child Sora raised. Do you know its uses?”

“No, Dalka, I don’t.”

“Oh dear, don’t be so angry.” Dalka put the flowers back in her bag. “They serve as a constituent of a coordinating enzyme substrate for fat-soluble vitamins. We use them to grow an intestinal yeast for hiking the back country. An inoculation lasts maybe two-three weeks, residing in the ileum of the small intestine. Enough for a good overpass hike, if not to live permanently in the high plains. Lord knows how the high plainsmen do it.” She sighed. “There are real mysteries up there, girl. They’ve done some first-rate enzyme work.”

“Momma talked about that... but she never taught me.”

“Of course not, dear. You were too young to appreciate the subtlety of it—and the subtlety’s everything and why men don’t fiddle with it.” Dalka put her arm around Tessa. “Humans wouldn’t be able to live on Koola a day if it weren’t for the tailored yeasts and bacteria we women produce in our little kitchen fermenters. It scares men, you know. Best thing about it, really. Tell them tailored bacteria, and they come up with stories of dead bodies with nervous systems full of living microbes lurching down from the high burials to find the doors they were carried out of.” She shook her head in rueful amusement. “So they build special doors for corpses while we tighten the knots in the Web.”

“The Web?” Tessa found the catechism annoying.

“The Web that keeps us from falling into the crevasses right under life on Koola. It’s supported us since time im-mem-morial.” Dalka lingered over the word as if it was a particularly delicious chocolate. She waved her arm, fat jiggling. “Take these dilberries, for example.”

Tessa looked up at the purple oil-containing fruit dangling just above them.

“If these trees were left alone,” Dalka said, “they’d die out. Nothing fertilizes them naturally. But they’re held by the Web. Men distract little wasps into them by hanging tangleflowers all over the trees. A paltry male secret. Did you ever look at those flowers and wonder why they were there?”

“I did, but—”

“But you thought it was all for love!” Dalka barked a laugh. “Well, we’ll see next spring, won’t we? Then I bet you won’t be sorry to be back from school.”

Tessa saw no need to respond to the sally. Lush tangleflower blossoms cascading from the branches, their intoxicating scent filling the dilberry groves, were a symbol of romance. It was a commonplace that a girl, having made love to her first boy under the trees, returned home with her loose hair full of tangleflower petals.

“Who invented it all, Dalka?” Tessa kept her thoughts on the matter at hand.

Dalka slowed for the first time. “It’s been done since time im-mem—”

“You said that.” Tessa’s lessons at Hammerswick came to her rescue. “But the ancestors of dilberries are native to Koola, while the wasps are gene-modified and come from Tal-Tal-Monga, famous for its biological products. And the tangleflowers—no one knows. So who put them all together?”

“That’s the magic of the Web.” Dalka retreated into obscurity. “And Sora wished you to learn its secrets.”

“Yes, Dalka.”

❖

Tessa started the next morning by hanging vegetables up to dry. The long dark-blue roots would, in a few weeks, taste like thick, greasy meat. No one in the upper Shield valleys favored the taste, but city dwellers on the edge of the Great Flats enjoyed it, for some reason. They were stupid enough to live down there in the thick air and so could not be expected to have sense about other things.

With mindless meticulousness, she quartered the arm-long tubers and strung them on the rack. She would take a stroll about the kitchen garden whenever her arms got tired and look off across the farms to the other wall of the canyon. At that moment farming seemed so painful that it had obviously been ordained by God as punishment for unknown sins.

She’d brought books back from Hammerswick but had progressed little in reading them. There was always some task to interrupt her, whether it was Benjamin’s hand, cut on a trellis, or the filth that accumulated in the house as if delivered daily by some unusually dutiful service, or simply the countless varieties of plant that grew in the canyon to be harvested every month. She had been able to spend very little time with the upstairs fossil collection, its complex Koolan taxonomies worked out in Sora’s careful hand, and longed to find out more about this, her mother’s private fascination. There were times now when she saw the farms and fields of Calrick Bend for what they were: a microscopically thin overlay of human action over an alien and enigmatic planet. That did not make the tubers any lighter.

After one turn about the garden she found Benjamin himself. He sat on the side stairs by the drying rack, paying diligent attention to the tension swivels on his dart rifle. He’d pulled the webbing off and was deliberately tightening it, strand by strand.

She sat down next to him. “Going hunting, Benjamin?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look at her but bent his head to his task. “It’s something that’s got to be done.”

Tessa looked at her younger brother’s curly-haired head. What made men so certain about things that were only guesses, presumptions, and dreams? “There’s plenty that has to be done here.” He finally looked up at her, his dark eyes appraising. “I
know
that. One thing is that I’m going to get that wapiti. The one, you remember, at Momma’s burial. That’s number one. Then me and Dom can get this family working again.”

Tessa fought down the anger that came at this childish arrogance. “How is killing the wapiti going to help?”

“I’ve been in the high valleys. It’s still up there. Something’s brought it down from the Boss. But I can find it. And kill it.”

“That’s good, Benjamin. But right now you can come and help me finish hanging these vegetables.”

He looked disgusted. “Come on. That’s your job. I have more important things to do.”

“Like hunting wapiti.”

“Like hunting wapiti.” His voice rose. “Like seeing that this family doesn’t just disappear.”

“We won’t disappear. But it takes work. We all have to work.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” Benjamin was near tears. “You’re not Momma. You can’t tell me what to do. You can’t run this family—”

Tessa felt her temper starting to fray. “I’m not trying to run this family.”

“Dom. Dom and I can run this family. We know what to do. We don’t need you messing into it.”

This was too much. Before he could react, Tessa darted forward, seized him with a strength she hadn’t known she had, and hung him up by his belt on the drying rack. He yelped. She looked at him in satisfaction. “You can just hang up there with the rest of the vegetables until you dry out.”

Completely forgetting his manly demeanor, Benjamin broke into tears. He wailed and kicked his legs.

“What the hell is this?” Dom strode past Tessa and regarded his brother. Benjamin choked down his sobs. Dom shook his head and pulled him off. Not looking at either of his siblings, Benjamin ran into the house, head down.

“You forgot your dart rifle!” Tessa shouted after him.

Dom bent over and picked it up. He looked at her. Annoyance and amusement vied for control of his face. “Now, Tessa, what did you have to go and do that for? Things are tough enough for him. His pride—”

“
His
pride?” Tessa was outraged. “What about mine?”

“He’s only thirteen.”

“Time for him to start learning about what’s important.” They stared at each other. “Any other objections?”

“No. There’s too much to get done.” He walked slowly away, dart rifle under his arm.

Kevin ran out of the house. “Ben’s crying!” His earnest face demanded more information.

“Yes, Kevin. He’s very upset.”

This seemed sufficient explanation. Kevin reached into the bin and wrestled out a tuber as long as he was. “Can I help?” It slithered in his arms as if alive. He stumbled around trying to subdue it, his face a mask of grim resolve. Tessa turned away, using every ounce of determination to keep from laughing. Pride was nothing to be trifled with.

❖

“We all climb up here,” Dalka said, breath wheezing dangerously as she labored up the trail. “But each of us seeks something different.” She pulled herself up onto a rock ledge, grunting. Below her was a hundred-meter drop. She sat down to dangle her feet over the edge and pulled out her pipe. On a planet with higher gravity she would have been confined; on Koola she was free.

“Men hunt,” Tessa said, sitting down next to her.

“They do. To no good purpose, in protein/energy balance terms.” Dalka puffed the pipe to light. “The time would be more usefully spent planting another crop.”

“I don’t think they see it in protein/energy balance terms.”

“That’s why they need us, dear.” Above their ledge was a slope made up of large toppled rock slabs. Dalka gestured at it. “We come up here for necessaries, not silly animals. The air’s right up here for the proper lichens. They should be on the shaded sides of those rocks.”

The air was thin and cold, shrugging off any influence of human beings. It was a high Shield air, dry and unforgiving. Tessa took the dry feeling in her nostrils as a benison. They had been climbing all morning, floating up the tilted cliff side, to this specific hanging alcove, a special place of Dalka’s. The lush bottom of Cooperset Canyon was now invisible behind cliffs and towers of rock.

Tessa climbed partway up the rock fall and searched shadowed cracks for the particular silver-blue lichen Dalka wanted. Its paracrinelike secretions were specific and rare, essential to Dalka’s enzyme operations. Was this really how she wanted to spend her rare days free of farm work? Tessa sighed, carefully inaudible.

“We do have to watch out for them, of course.” Dalka’s tenor voice carried easily on the breeze. “They know these high valleys, of course, as well as we do. Better, maybe, because they run around so much, chasing their beasts.” She made the admission grudgingly. “But they still get lost, and since they’re convinced that they don’t get lost, they’re hard to find. You’ll find an occasional dried-up body in a crevasse—the bad end of an unsuccessful hunting trip. No telling how old they are.”

Tessa paused and peered down into the shadows. Was that a bony hand stretching out toward the sunlight from beneath the rock? No, no, it was just a couple of dried twigs. She squinted at it one last time and went back to work. A patch of the necessary lichen covered the top lip of a particularly precarious rock.

“So how do you watch out for them?” she asked, after a moment. Dalka did not reply immediately, but sent up an exceptionally large puff of smoke, as if to remind Tessa where she was.

Tessa chimneyed up to the lichen and hung there as she scraped at it. It smelled bitter and dusty. From her precarious perch she could see the shattered teeth of Ariel’s, Fulda’s, Top Hat, and Angel’s Buttes, blue with distance. To the right, visible only as a succession of ever-hazier ranges, was the height of the Boss, the Plateau hidden behind it. A sand hawk flew overhead, catching a thermal from the open area at the base of Caspar’s Lith. Tessa paused in her work, feeling the glory of the heights. There was nothing she liked better than walking the high cliffs, when she had a chance. Dalka did too, puffing and wheezing her way formidably up the slopes, so they made natural companions.

“A number of ways,” Dalka said finally. Another pause. “Most they don’t know about.”

“Oh, Dalka,” Tessa said, exasperated. “I’m not going to tell.”

“I’m sure you won’t, dear. Even under the soft blossoms of the tangleflowers.”

“When the time for that comes, I’m sure I’ll have other things to talk about.”

Dalka laughed explosively. “Fair enough, child. And secrets cease to be anything if no one knows them. Well... my favorite is a simple one. Do you clean your brothers’ boots?”

“Only Kevin’s. He’s young and they’re really tiny, so it’s fun. The others stay dirty.”

“Give it a try. Just a bit of extra work, nothing for a woman. There’s a leather polish, an emollient and binder complex, that works well. As a side effect, the boots then leave traces on the rocks. A few simple enzyme reactions and you can track any given pair of boots, if you have a sensitive nose.” She chortled. “And the men think you’re doing it so their feet will be clean-shod.”