Woman On The Edge Of Time (35 page)

“Really!” Dawn hugged herself. “That’s running good! I can’t wait! They’re fasure dangerous, aren’t they! I mean, they killed millions of people!”

“But quietly,” Luciente cautioned.

Dawn babbled with excitement. “I studied about them. I saw them on holi. How the whole society was built around them, they paved over the earth for them to run on and sit on right in the middle of where they lived! Everyone had to have one. And they all set out in their private autocar to go someplace at the same time and got stuck in jams and breathed poison and got sick. Yet people loved their autocars like family. They drove fast in them till they wore out and ran into each other and got broken and burned and mangled and still they would rather drive in their autocars than do anything! Now can I see one?”

“But it felt good to ride in them,” she said to the child, not daring to touch her. Small brown arm with the bandage where she must have hurt her tender flesh. “You could get into a car and go riding in the country anytime you wanted.”

“But there were so many of you. How could you go riding at the same time without running into each other?”

Martin’s golden Mustang. “Sometimes when you’re young, oh, just riding in a car, a convertible maybe with the top down and the radio turned on, a song with a beat … You feel on top of the world. You feel so … alive, so beautiful!”

Mother and child surveyed her blankly. “Often we feel good,” Luciente protested, “but it usually has to do with work, as when I found the bug in our experiment. Or when we’re together in the fooder talking and in the morning telling dreams. Or after the critting session with Bolivar, when you feel others love and care and we live connected and must struggle to do better together. When Bee was with you, you were pleased. What does that have to do with objects?”

They wriggled through the bushes close enough to the highway so that Dawn could peer out. “Ooooh!” she said when a truck thundered past. “It stinks!”

“Shh.” Luciente dropped a warning hand on her finely turned shoulder.

“How could they hear us, making so much noise?” But Dawn whispered.

“See, there’s a car,” Connie said. “The red one. It’s a Chevy Vega.”

“How come person inside has the windows all the way up when it’s so hot? Is person scared of something?” Dawn asked.

“He probably has the air conditioning on—a machine that makes it cool,” Connie said, studying Dawn’s hair and ears.

“Only one person in that whole machine! So much energy spent! The sadness of it, the loneliness!” Luciente blew her nose.

“Don’t cry, Mama,” Dawn said, kissing her cheek. “Why sadden? It just seems stupid.”

“All those people in metal boxes, alone and cut off!” Luciente shook her head. “How could you start to talk? Make friends? Once when I was returning from visiting my childhood family, I took ill suddenly. My fever rose and I felt dreadful. A person helped me lower my fever and the dipper rerouted to a hospital for me … . Traveling I always meet people I exchange pleasure with—a meal, a conversation, a coupling, interseeing, a making of music, drumming to their slide playing … . Locked in a metal box, how I could make contact? The accidents they had were bumping of metal on flesh. Our accidents are bumping of flesh against flesh, the brushing of lives—”

“Shhh!” Connie thrust herself flat. A police car went by at less than usual speed. Sinister in its lazy patrol. She cringed against the ground, clammy with fear. When it had gone, she began to crawl back from the highway. “Let’s get out of here.”

When they reached her tree, Luciente had already sent Dawn back. Luciente took her hand then and held it. “Dawn is too young to comprend why you love per. But
we
love you back.”

Connie wanted to speak of the night with Bee, but could not. She looked down, sorry she could not say her feelings. “I … I,” was all she could stammer. “I … pues … I want you to know …”

Luciente beamed. “I found water and also rumcherries and blackberries. The water is unclean. Has residues of lead, cadmium, copper, and strontium ninety. But the water you drank in your space was also unclean. The bacteria content of this water is little higher than that. Will you drink it?”

“Sure.” She gathered up her shoes and smock and followed
Luciente. The water oozed from the earth perhaps half a mile farther on, near the edge of the patch of woods. It was dark brown and she feared it, but her mouth was sore and dry, her throat burned again. They put a beer bottle and a jar in the small stream to soak as clean as they could, so that after she had drunk her fill, slowly as Luciente warned her, she could carry away water.

Blackberries grew in great arching brambles at the wood’s far edge. Only some were ripe and fell into her hand with their fat juicy weight when she touched them. They were sweet and winy in her mouth. After she had eaten and drunk and picked more for later, Luciente pointed out bouncing Bet to her, pretty pale pink flowers that looked as if they might have escaped from a garden. “Use the leaves for soap.”

“I have real soap.” She rescued the scrap from the pocket of the denim jacket and finally cleaned herself slowly but thoroughly in the brown water of the spring.

Then Luciente showed her half a dozen other weeds she could eat, all of which she took as samples obediently but without enthusiasm. As dusk thickened, so did the cloud of mosquitoes settling over her. They left Luciente alone. “They know I’m not real,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t a bad idea to bring Dawn through. Dawn is a little bent to personal heroics. I should’ve consulted my corns … .

“It’s twilight. Do you think we could risk a small fire?”

“Anything. Look at my arms and legs!” Her body was lumpy with bites. The bugs were settling on her in colonies, like rows of oil derricks pumping away. She and Luciente moved a distance from the spring, back among the pines, but the mosquitoes followed them. Finally she tore western New York from the map and together with dry fallen branches and twigs, they set a fire that caught on the fourth match. “You can roast your potatoes.”

“I forgot them.” She settled against a tree. “Maybe they’ve stopped looking for me. If I was them, I’d watch Dolly’s. After all, I have to go to her for money.”

“This money complicates your lives.”

“But you have those credits.”

Luciente settled down cross-legged across the fire. “Luxuries are scarce. There is only so much Bordeaux, so much
caviar, so much Altiplano gray cheese. Necessities are not scarce. We grow enough food. But there are things no one needs that people enjoy. We try to spread them around. In our region we each get a fixed number of luxury credits. We can spend them all on some really rare luxury—a bottle of great old wine like a 2098 vintage Port for my birthday—or we can have many little treats. We can even save them up for two years. In Parra’s region, Tejas del Sur, they do it by productivity. They have a fixed number of credits for the region, and villages are allotted points by how much above their quota they produce. We think they’ll get tired of that system. It creates rivalry.”

“I think I’d spend my credits on clothes.”

“But that makes no sense, Connie. The costumes circulate. You take them out as you want them. The flimsies anybody can design. A flimsy is as good as you can imagine it to be.”

“But aren’t some clothes better than others?”

“We all have warm coats and good rain gear. Work clothes that wear well. The costumes are labors of love people give to the community when they want to make something pretty. Sometimes I want to dress up beautiful. Other times I want to be funny. Sometimes I want to body a fantasy, an idea, a dream. Sometimes I want to recall an ancestor, or express a truth about myself—that, say, I am a stubborn goat in character.” Luciente laughed.

“What do you use your credits for, then? Those carved drums I saw you carrying?”

“No, no! Those were made for me by Otter for my birthday. Me, I like Port. And I love the sweet German wine, especially Mosels and Saars and Ruwers. And I like to give presents. Mostly I make them, which is twice a gift, as we say. But sometimes I like to give something pretty and exotic. I can always think of more things to spend credits on than I have credits.”

“Don’t you wish you could have more?”

“As we become more productive, worldwide, as we put less energy into repairing past damages, then we’ll put more energy into producing the unnecessary—the delightful, the pleasing. It will happen.”

Connie smiled, poking the fire idly with a stick that charred at the end. “I ask you about I and you answer me about We.”

“Connie, we are born screaming Ow and I! The gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate. Everything we learn aims to make us feel strong in ourselves, connected to all living. At home.”

“I’m at home here only because you helped me.”

“But this too is a human landscape. Look, someone planted these white pines. Regularly spaced. Look closely at the ground. Beneath the needles you can see marks of old furrows. Plowed ground. As long before you as I am living after you, crops grew here. The earth lives, if it isn’t murdered.”

“Tonight I have to move on. I can’t stay here.”

“Where will you go?”

“Down the highway, there’s a good-sized town in maybe ten miles. I’m not sure how far I’ve come. There has to be a bus station there. I’ll walk through the night and then in the morning go to the bus station. Then I’ll go as far as I can on five dollars. I’ll use what I have left for food and some clothes from a thrift shop. A dress, some secondhand shoes, and a purse. Once I get to New York I figure I’m safe.”

Luciente required definitions of thrift shop, ticket, purse, and still she looked dubious. “Soaking the sumac in water will give us a poultice for your feet.”

When Luciente prepared the sticky mess, she pressed it on her soles. Then Luciente kissed her, wished her success, and left. The baked potatoes were mealy and almost inedible without salt, but she ate them anyhow, slowly. A potato without salt roasted in freedom can taste wonderful. Then she lay on her smock, but she did not sleep. Her brain would not quite shut down. Instead she half dreamed. The fire had burned out to dim coals that still gave off some smoke, some warmth.

The embryos in the brooder swam and sang to her, a fish song that did not bubble but vibrated directly into her body, into her midriff; they were bobbing and schooling and serenading her. All were promising to be her little baby, they would be her baby tonight, tomorrow, maybe on Sunday. She would be co-mother, she would have a baby again of her own to suckle at her breast, to carry, to rock to sleep. Her robbed body twisted to seize one.

She was watching a birth. The three mothers were ritually bathed in a sauna-sweat house and, dressed in red, they were
brought in a procession of family and friends to the brooder. One of the mothers was Sojourner, the old person from Luciente’s family with eyes of coal chips, one of the mothers was Jackrabbit, and the third was her. They held each other’s hands and she walked in the middle. The robes were heavy, encrusted with embroidery. On hers were doves and eggs. Everyone was carrying bouquets of late summer flowers, asters and phlox and white lilies streaked with crimson and wide as plates that lay down a heavy scent, bouquets of marigold and nasturtium.

Some were dmmming, and toward the back of the procession a child was playing one of those flutes that sounded poignant and sad to her, although the melody was gay enough. Her heart felt too large under the robe. She gripped the hands of her comothers tight, tight, till Sojourner gently asked her not to squeeze so much, while Jackrabbit gave her grip for grip. Just behind them Luciente beat on her carved drums a syncopated galloping march. Bee nodded to her, carrying a sheaf of yellow and red and bronze bold-faced sunflowers.

As they came to the brooder, everyone fell back except the three of them, who entered. They stood under the sterilizer, helping each other out of the robes and hanging them on hooks to the side. Naked they went into the center chamber, where Barbarossa, the birther, was waiting for them. Dressed in his brooder uniform of yellow and blue, he embraced each. As she looked down at herself, she felt her breasts, swollen from the shots, already dribbling colostrum. She and Jackrabbit were to breast-feed. Sojourner explained she had decided not to try it.

“I didn’t have my first child till I was fifty-five,” she said. “I fought in the battle of Space Platform Alpha. And in the battle of Arlington and Fort Bragg. Long, long before we had brooders, I had myself sterilized so that I wouldn’t be tempted to turn aside from the struggle. I thought I had left my sex behind me. Now I am seventy-four and my family does me the honor of believing there’s enough life in me to make a mother a second time.”

Now all three knelt, the old woman getting down slowly but stubbornly on her gnarled knees. Barbarossa stood before them like a priest officiating at Mass. “Do you, Sojourner, desire this baby to be born?”

“I, Sojourner, desire to mother this child”

“Do you, Jackrabbit, desire this baby to be born?” and then “Do you, Connie, desire this baby to be born?”

She said softly, “I do. I, Connie, desire to mother this child.”

Barbarossa turned. The gawky teen-age assistant she had met in the brooder was delivering the baby from the strange contracting canal while Barbarossa stood by to tie the cord and hold it squalling up, screaming and squirming. A small black girl whose skin gleamed waxy and bright.

“Do you, Sojourner, accept this child, Selma, to mother, to love, and then to let go?”

Sojourner held out her old black arms for the baby, nestling it to her. “I’ll mother you, love you, and let you go, Selma.”

“Do you, Jackrabbit, accept this child to mother, to love, and then to let go?”

Jackrabbit received the baby from Sojourner. “I’ll mother you, love you, and let you go, Selma.”

At last Connie held the baby and its small ruby-red mouth closed around her nipple, sucking deep. Black, like Bee: she was sure she was given this baby from her time with Bee, a baby black and velvety with huge eyes to drink in the world.

She woke in the dark. The fire was dead and cold. Clouds covered the sky. She rubbed her legs till she felt less numb. Then she put on her dry shoes and straightened herself as well as she could and headed for the highway. In the dark she thrashed awkwardly through the brush and for a long time she couldn’t find the road, until she stumbled out almost in the path of a car.