Where Grow The Barrel Trees
Part 1 (As promised, rejection season's starting with a bang, and we pass the savings on to you!)
Ismarada’s long black hair fluttered in the hot, salty wind as she loped down the regolith towards Clytemnestra to bring home the new man. She kicked the red dirt, the gray dirt, the green dirt, puff, puff, puff, with her sandals made of cut-out, worn-down tire segments. Pebbles flew. She passed the scraggly beige grasses, the sickly gray scrub, looking like living drought.
“Hello, plants!” she called. She ran her fingers down their stems and branches: she knew they weren’t half dead but stronger than strong men, as stiff as steel cable. She couldn’t harm them. Those grass stems were growing before humans landed on Iphigenia; those bushes were growing before Columbus discovered America. They’d be here still in a thousand years …
Maybe. She frowned and shaded her eyes. Clytemnestra was still a few kilometers away, a dirty blotch of canvas and clapboards along the shimmering Little Ocean.
Her father’s voice was in her mind. “It’s an empty world, Ismarnjo. We’re moving out in every direction. Twenty years ago, Clytemnestra wasn’t even an idea. A hundred years from now, it’ll be the biggest polis on this side of the world. Fields! Orchards! Grass, girl. Wet, green grass. Imagine it. Drink it in! Birds everywhere! People everywhere.”
She looked up. There were already Terran birds looping overhead, ragged desert raptors. There was little for them to find. She didn’t know what more birds would eat. Terran life was scarce. Indigestible Iphigenian land life was overgrown at beetle-sized, except for the solitary xenosnakes, and desert rats and Terran snakes were still uncommon.
But the plants! So much desert, but where they grew, they grew. Wirewood, death to touch; tufty pompon grasses. Scraggly perse wort. Savage tiny urchin-cactus more thorn than plant. The purple-green barrel trees, her favorites.
Scuff, kick, puff. She found a round stone and kicked it down the trail, again and again, until she lost it in a landslide of scree from the hills above.
“Farms everywhere! Imagine—no famine.”
She sighed. Da was right. The fields had to come. She’d gone hungry a lot as a baby and again when she was ten. She was still skinny at twenty, not as tall as she should be. There was famine on the other side of the world right now, and the polises here tried to send as much as the others begged for. There was no milk, there was no fruit, precious little bread. Kids had bowed legs, staring eyes, in the newsfeeds. But here, more farmland laid out every month. So much desert and always the struggle to add microbes, add worms and bugs, put in Terran groundcover, a hectare at a time. Hectares of farmland meant saved lives.
Kick, puff.
The co-op’s doors stood open, and she walked in. Farmers leaned on the counter, sorting white packets of seeds the Biosphere Corps combines sent. The selection wasn’t great.
White-bearded Mistr’ Coffalo played Four-stones with Mistr’ Valljet, whose face quivered with dry, papery wrinkles. They talked in some old language from their childhood before the polis governments started teaching the new language of hope and unity.
“Dejkiep mejking desejm mistejks. Doaztings woan grohier.”
“Dej woant groeniver.”
“Hello, Mistr’ Coffalo,” she said. “How’s Missus Coffalo?”
“Poorly,” he said, in his old-style accent. “She’s had the Fever for a week and hardly seems better. The nurse is with her, but there’s no medicine on the last plane.”
“Sorry to hear,” she said. “What did they send?”
“Sent a lot of tools,” Coffalo said, moving a counter on the board.
“Sent him,” Mistr’ Vall’et said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Him was a youth sitting on a metaplastoc drum of nails by the counter. He was brown-skinned, with a broad nose, hazel eyes, and wavy gold hair. He wore buttoned work coveralls like the farmers, but where theirs were a faded dusty blue-white, his were almost new, still crisp, with red tags and distinct blue and white stripes. Only his boots were old and worn. A card tag hung by a string from one strap. His shirt was blue, button-down, long sleeves against the sun, a checked neckerchief, a brown corduroy jacket over his knee, and a straw hat pushed far back. He looked uncertain, as if he was surprised to be there. He was thin and hungry-looking, and he had a knapsack.
The warmth in the concrete block co-op felt stagnant. He wiped his forehead.
She tossed her black hair over her shoulders. “I’m Ismarada Manca,” she said, thrusting her hand out.
He took it. “Corson Nine,” he said.
She looked closely at him. “You’re a clone,” she decided.
“Yeah,” he agreed. He lifted his left arm. There was a paper band on his wrist with his name and his serial. “I was working around Aulis. They couldn’t feed us. The provisional council of polises evacuated us to places where farms are producing.”
“I’ve heard that,” she said vaguely. He’s the new man, then, she thought.
“I flew with fifty others on a plane to this side of the world, dropped off here and there. I’ve been in the air off and on for twenty hours.”
“Suff,” she said. “Bad over there?”
“Not quite as bad as it was—sort of. There’s been rain on the north side of the Big Ocean, which saved the rubber tree plantations they’re laying out. People fled there from Aulis. There’s cattle to spare on the plains north of them, so there’s a little meat. Better. But it isn’t good.”
“You eaten?”
“Not today,” he admitted.
She took bread from her pouch, broke it, and shared it, and he ate, ravenous like a jackal. She got him a paper cone of water from the thick-walled orange co-op jug on the counter, and he drank greedily.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” He was handsome, in an underfed kind of way. “Who’s got your contract?”
“Well,” he looked at the tag hanging off his coveralls, “a man named Manca.” He looked at her.
“Suff!” she said again. “That’s Da. He’s the Terraforming Chief here.” She put her hands on her hips. “You’re who he sent me for.”
“Glad to have met you,” he said.
“Come on, let’s go. The Planning Station’s up-slope a fair way, and I walked down.”
She pointed out the sights: the drab sheds and gray clapboard and pressboard shacks of Clytemnestra, the metal quonset town offices where the ephor worked, the mostly empty granaries, the little breeder reactor, the Lower-School, the Upper-School, the handful of private businesses strangling without regular supplies from the starvation-stilled factories on the other side of the world. The garbage-lot, where, after school, children sorted and reclaimed everything they could. The few score houses. And then, the farm-lots and gardens carefully watered from streams trickling to dusty death off the Upper Plateau. The aquifer station pumping. And then the wild lands beyond.
She led him to a high point, and he looked around at the naked red and gray hills, at the pearly saline waters of the Little Ocean, in whose shallows nothing lived. A truck threw up dust on the road below.
“Might be Da,” she said. “Yah, he’s turning, gonna check on the pumping station.”
“What will I do?” he asked.
“Whatever,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Planted trees,” he said. “Biosphere Corps organism-mills punch them out, and we planted them until they were trying to make food instead. Then I was building refugee camps, and then laying down soil barrier to make sure the dirt didn’t blow away from the farmlands. Done a lot of stuff. What’s those?” He pointed. “Comms towers?”
She laughed. “Oh, no,” she said. She smiled. “Oh, no, those are my trees. My barrel trees.”
They were tall, thirty meters and more, cylindrical, and three or four meters thick at the base and nearly that at the top, with ragged, tentacly tops and spines or whiskers growing at the bases. They were black-purple with green shades and bruises and creases, and she led him down the trail to them. He looked up and up, and when they arrived, she wondered what he’d say. Everyone else called them ugly.
But he touched them gently, first one then another like they were shy horses, and his mouth went O the higher he looked at them. They moved slightly in the brisk winds bearing out of the Upper Plateau’s ragged rim, where the badlands cut cañons into the edges. Some people called them unpleasant to the hand, but she thought they were firm like aubergines. They left a dry, aged scent like an old book on her skin.
She was pleased with his reaction. “Aren’t they wonderful?”
He circled the base, touching the long, long whiskers that fuzzed their lower two meters. Those were slightly sticky, with dried globs of honeydew.
“They are,” he said. “Something like them, but smaller, around Aulis. Never seen them so big.” He touched the whiskers at the bases, whose tips were hung with globs the color of amber. “What’s this? Sugars?”
“Da says it attracts native insects. He thinks they exchange genetic material that way. The trees to the insects and back.”
Corson touched his finger to his tongue.
“Oh, you won’t want to do that,” she said.
“Poison?” he said, alarmed, snatching his fingertip away.
“Not these … probably. Some is. Native stuff, can’t trust it.”
“Wirewood. I’ve seen that. Seen men die of it.”
She shivered. “Yah. Not my barrels. But we don’t know how it all works … connects … ” She trailed off. “I’m glad you like them.”
He smiled.
“The station’s that way,” she pointed. “Home. Come on! Mum will be in the garden.”
Part 5