The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (68 page)

At the greentent I stopped. “I have to take Sombra her dress,” I said, barely able to keep the excitement of the day out of my voice. “We have to get ready for graduation.” He did not let go of my arm, but his
hand seemed to go suddenly lifeless. I patted his cold hand and ran into the house to get Sombra’s dress and down the steps past him with it over my arm, fluttering pink ribbons as I ran. He still stood there, as if he had finally seen the frozen blossoms and could not hide his grief.

It was not a cherrybright. It was a quarantine sticker, tied to one of the distance markers. I stood for a moment
by the peach tree looking at it as my father had done, the dress as heavy on my arm as my hand had been on his. “No!” I said, as sharply as he had and took off running.

I could not even let myself think what breaking quarantine meant. “I don’t care,” I told myself, catching my breath at the last corner of the fence. “It’s graduation,” I would tell Mamita. “The
Magassar
will be landing with all
those flowers. We have to be there.”

Mamita would look reluctant, thinking of the consequences.

“One of the hands
has it, doesn’t he? The new ones always get it. But this is our
graduation!
You can’t let him spoil it. Think of all the flowers,” I would say. “Sombra has to see them. She’ll die if she doesn’t see them. Give her a strip. Give us both one. We won’t get it.”

I climbed over the fence,
careful of the dress. Even folded double, it almost dragged on the ground. The gate would be locked. I cut through the field at a dead run and came up to the house the back way, past the greentent. The door stood open, but I could not see anyone through the plastic. Sombra must have hurried through her chores to get ready and left the door open. Mamita would kill her. I could not stop to shut
it now, because someone might see me and turn me in. I had to get to Mamita and convince her first.

I knocked at the back door, leaning against the scratchy stalk of a tallgrass, too breathless for a moment to say any of the things I had planned to say. Then Mamita opened the door, and I knew I would never say any of them.

I could hear a baby crying in the house. Mamita passed her hand over
her chest, pressing as if there were a pain there. Then she put her hand up to her forehead. There were brilliant scarlet creases on the inside of her elbows. “Why, Haze, what are you doing here?” she said.

“I brought Sombra’s dress,” I said.

A sudden, hitting anger flared out of her black eyes, and I stumbled back, raking my arm against the tallgrass. It came to me much later that she must
have thought I brought the dress for Sornbra’s laying out, that she had felt the same anger as Mother did when she saw me standing and still healthy while the babies died, one after the other. I did not think of that then. All I could think was that it was not one of the hands, that it was Sombra who was sick.

“For graduation,” I said, holding the dress out insistently. If I could make her take
it, then it would not be true.

“Thank you, Haze,” she said, but she didn’t take it. “Her father’s already gone,” she said. “Sombra’s…” and in that breath of a second, I thought she was going to say that she was dead already, too, and I could not, would not let her say that.

“The
Magassar
will be landing this morning. I could go over there for you. I could catch a downer. I’d be back in no time.
The
Magassar’s
bringing a whole load of antibiotics. I heard the district nurse say so.”

“He died before the district nurse could get here. He wouldn’t let me call until we found Sombra in the greentent. He didn’t want to spoil her graduation.”

“But the
Magassar…”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “Sombra was the twentieth,” she said.

I still could not take
in what she was saying. “There was
only one call. That makes nineteen.” One call. Sombra and her father. One call.

“You should go home and take a strip, dear,” she said. “You’ll have been exposed.” She put her hand to my cheek, and it burned like a brand. “Tell your mother thank you for the dress,” she said, and shut the door in my face.

When Francie found me, I was sitting under the peach tree with Sombra’s dress across my lap
like a blanket. The last of the blossoms fell on the dress, already dead and dying like the flowers aboard the
Magassar.

“Papa says for you to come up to the house,” Francie said. Mama had curled her hair with sugar water for graduation. The curls were stiff against her pink cheeks.

“There isn’t any graduation,” I said.

“I know
that,”
she said disdainfully. “Mamma’s been making me take strips
all morning long. She thinks I’m going to get it.”

“No,” I said, my cheeks burning from the brand of Sombra’s cheek, Mamita’s hand. The pain pressed against my sternum and would not go away. “I’m going to get it.”

“I
told
Mama I didn’t even sit near her. And how you never let me walk home with you two, how you always ride the downer. She sent for me as soon as she found out about Mr. Phelps,
and Sombra wasn’t even sick then. But she wouldn’t listen. Anyway, you never get sick. She probably won’t even make you take a strip. And Sombra wasn’t sick yesterday, was she? So you probably weren’t exposed either. Mama says the incubation period is really short.” She remembered why she had been sent. “Papa says you’re supposed to come
now.”
She flounced off.

I stood up, still careful of the
white dress, and followed Francie through the field of scratchy wheat. They don’t know about my breaking quarantine, I thought in amazement. I wondered why Father had sent for me. Perhaps he knew and wanted to talk to me before he turned me in. “What does he want?” I said.

“I don’t know. He said I was supposed to come and get you before the downer came. There’s been one already, with a coffin.
For Mr. Utrillo.”

I stopped and looked back toward the road. The downer rattled past the peach tree, spraying water over the scattered blossoms, wetting the coffin it pulled behind it. Sombra’s coffin. He had at least tried to spare me that. And now I would have to try to spare him my dying, as much as I could.

I imposed my own
quarantine, sneaking a strip as soon as I got back to the house.
I had been afraid that Mother would make me take one, but she didn’t, although Francie was already sitting at the kitchen table when I came in, protesting the bright red strip Mother held in her hand. I held the strip I had stolen behind my back until I could get out to the greentent. I took it there, huddled under the ponics tank in case it took a long time. It blanched white as soon as the paper
was in my mouth. I did not need the strip to tell me I was getting sick. Sombra’s cheek, her mother’s hand, burned on my face like a brand.

No one reported me. I did not doubt that Mamita, much as she loved me, would have turned me in. This was more than a planetwide. It was a local, too. The
Magassar
had already broken its orbit and was heading for home. We were on our own, and the only way
to stop it was to keep the quarantine from being broken. Which meant Mamita had the fever, too, that maybe all the people on the Turillo stead were dead or sick with it and no one to help them.

I tried to stay out of everyone’s way, especially Francie’s. I talked with my head averted and asked to do the wash and the dishes so I could sterilize my own things. I picked a fight with Francie and
called her a taga-long, so that she avoided me as carefully as I did her. Mother paid no attention to me. She had eyes only for Francie.

Three weeks after Sombra died, Father said at supper, “The local’s off at Turillos’. Mamita’s over it. The district nurse cleared her this afternoon.”

“The twins?” Mother said.

He shook his head. “Both of them died. But none of the hands came down with it.
Six months here and not one of them has had so much as a white strip.”

“It was an unusual strain,” Mother said. “It doesn’t prove anything. They could all die tomorrow.”

“I doubt it,” he
said. “The incubation period was very short, as you said. But none of the hands got it.” He put a subtle emphasis on the word ‘none.’

“Yet,” Mother said. “I’m sure Haven isn’t through coming up with new strains.
We’re still without antibiotics.” The fear I had expected was not in her voice.

“They intercepted the
Magassar
halfway home and told them we’d had no new cases in a week. They’re holding where they are for a week, and then if there are no other reported, they’ll come back.” He smiled at me. “I’m full of good news today, Haze. The peaches didn’t freeze after all. We’re getting some fruit starting.”

He turned and looked at Mother, and said in the same cheerful tone, “You’ll have to move the geraniums out of the ponics.”

Mother put her hand up to her cheek as if he had hit her. “I talked to Mamita,” he said. “She said she’ll buy all the corn we can give her. Cash crop.”

“Can I move the flowers back to plaindirt?” she asked.

“No,” Father said. “I’ll need to put the corn wherever I can.”

She looked at him across the table as if he were her enemy, and he looked just as steadily back. It was as if a bargain had been struck between them, and the price she was paying was her precious flowers. I wondered what price Father had paid.

“If the peaches aren’t frozen, they could be our cash crop, Father,” I said urgently. “They’ll ripen almost as fast as the corn and you know how hungry
everyone will be for real fruit.”

“No,” Father said. His eyes never left her face. “We need the cash from the corn. To pay for something. Don’t we?”

“Yes,” she said, and pushed her chair back from the table. “You have your cash crop and I have mine.”

“I want to put the corn in tomorrow,” he shouted after her. “Pull your geraniums out this afternoon.” Francie was staring at him wide-eyed. “Come
on, Haze,” he said more quietly, “I’ll show you the peaches.”

They did not even look like fruit. But they were there, hard little swellings like pebbles where the tight blossoms had been. “You see,” he said, “we’ll have our cash crop yet.”

The quarantine sticker
was gone from Sombra’s fence. My strip had been white again this morning, and the ache that never quite left me was deeper, into my
lungs now.

“First-generation colonies don’t have cash crops,” Father said. “They’re too busy hanging on, too busy trying to stay alive. They’re abjectly grateful for what the government gives them—greentents, antibiotics, anything. Second-generation aren’t so grateful. The wheat’s doing well and they start noticing that the government’s help isn’t all that helpful. Third-generation colonies aren’t
grateful at all. They have cash crops and they can buy what they need from earth, not beg for it. Fourth-generation stop growing wheat altogether and start manufacturing what they need and to hell with earth.”

“We’re fourth-generation,” I said, not understanding.

Father had carried down a bucket of lime-sulphur and water and a wad of cloth rags to paint the peaches with. He dipped a rag in the
bucket and pulled it out dripping. “No, Haze,” he said. “We’re first-generation, and if the government has its way, we’ll be first-generation forever. The strep keeps us down, keeps us fighting for our lives. We can’t develop light industry. We can’t even keep our children alive long enough to graduate them from high school. We’ve been here nearly seventy years, Haze, and this is our first graduation.”

“They could drop the antibiotics without landing, couldn’t they?” I said. Little Willie upstairs in the big bed, crying for Mama. “They could wipe it out altogether if they wanted to.” Father was bending over the sulphur-smelling bucket, dipping the rag in the liquid. “Why aren’t you doing something about it?”

I expected him to say there was nothing they could do, that it was impossible to manufacture
antibiotics without filters and centrifuges and reagents, which the government would never ship us. I expected him to say that the only manufactured goods they shipped were those guaranteed not to be vandalized for parts and that the main virtue of the dust-downers as far as the government saw it was that they could not be turned into equipment for making antibiotics. But he wiped industriously
at a peach and said, “We will be second-generation yet, Haze,” he said. “We’ll have our cash crops, and the government won’t be able to stop us. They’re shipping us the one thing we need right now, and they don’t even know it.”

I knelt by the bucket, dipping the worn cloth in the sulphur-smelling liquid.

“When I first tried to
grow peaches, Haze, I used ordinary peach seeds from back home. I
started them in the ponics tanks and some of them lived long enough to bloom and I crossed them with others that had survived. Do you remember that, Haze? When the greentent was full of peach trees?”

I shook my head, still kneeling by the bucket. I could not even imagine it. Now there was no room for anything, not even Mother’s geraniums.

“I bred for what I thought they needed—a thick skin to
stand the sorrel ants and a short trunk to stand the wind, but I couldn’t do any genetic engineering. There isn’t any equipment. I could only cross the ones that did well, the ones that lived long enough to bloom. I knew what I was breeding for, but not what I would get. I never thought it would be so…stunted and turned in upon itself…”

He was not looking at the tree. He was looking at me. The
rag he held was dripping whitish water on the toe of his shoe. “We have people working in emigration, some of them colonists, some of them not, looking at the gene prints and deciding on the emigration permits. We all thought your mother…her genetic prints were almost exactly like Mr. Phelps’, and he’d never had the strep. I’ve only had it twice in all these years. If it was a few points off, still
it would be close enough, we thought. You cannot do the same things to people that you do to peach trees. Because it matters when they die.

“All I have left is this one pale and stunted tree,” he said, and squeezed out the rag on the ground and began painting the fruit again. “And you.”

The next day we trenched the tree, filling the narrow moat with dried mud and straw to keep the sorrel ants
away. Father did not say anything more, and I could not tell anything from his face.