Where Grow the Barrel Trees
Part 4
The truck came back late from the potato farms. Da looked strained and haggard but checked the fruit trees despite exhaustion. Reddened and silent, Mum spent a long time in the shower before wrapping herself in a towel and going to bed without a word. Corson sat on the veranda with a small sack of pale brown potatoes, a couple of kilos, idly rolling one like a ball, back and forth.
She sat next to him on the concrete pad.
“Glad to see you.”
He nodded, tired. “Me too.”
“How was it?”
“Hard,” he said. “Used to that, though.”
“Did you get hungry?”
He shook his head. “No. Well, a little yesterday evening. I didn’t feel … like I did and got a little hungry. I ate some breakfast. I could eat, I guess, now.”
“Yah.”
“Why did it happen?”
“I … talked to them.”
He looked at his potato-dirty hands and then at her. “Them.”
“Yah.”
“The dream.”
They sat in silence for a minute. “They know more about us now.”
He stirred slightly. “They. Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“The trees?”
She shrugged. “There’s no native intelligent life here,” she said flatly. “There’s hardly any native life here.”
“I know.” He was shoulder to shoulder with her. She leaned her head, sweat-lank hair tumbling. His hand was on hers.
A few stray bats fluttered overhead, skreeking.
“What did you say to them?”
“They asked me if we were always hungry,” she said. “And … they looked … in me.” She touched her forehead. “They didn’t know … they didn’t know why we came.”
He leaned back on his hands thoughtfully. On the horizon by the dead sea you could just see the cluster of shacks and houses of Clytemnestra and the dull yellow electric lights on poles scattered through the settlement.
“What did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” she said, upset. “They saw it all like they were sitting with me in class listening.” She closed her eyes—explorers, leaders, scientists … ship captains … soldiers … kings, psychopaths, slavers, murderers. Cities burned away. Screaming in the dark.
She felt the shame again. “I couldn’t hide. It was embarrassing.”
He nodded slowly. “Yah,” he agreed.
“Do you think you’re human?” she asked suddenly.
He rolled his eyes. “Sure. Why not?”
“Some people don’t. Because of the whole DNA being printed off and stuck in a fake cell thing.”
“Twenty-six chromosomes,” he said, squeezing her leg. His fingers were long, gentle, and warm. “Same as you. Baby in a bottle like you in a womb. Same-same. I never thought about it until someone told me what she thought one day.” He stood up. “Come on.” He offered his hand.
“Not sure I feel like it.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “But I want to sleep underneath them again and see what they say.”
The dreams came quickly; they were close and gentle around them and bore them up. They could see across the Little Ocean, onto the Upper Plateau, and across thousands of kilometers of salt flats and tumblestone lands. They lay hand in hand on the blanket but were everywhere. There were the scrubby little plants, the winding part-algae, part-fungus, part-animal growths everywhere. The barrel trees, on mesas, in cañons, in arroyos, lone amid endless hamadas. All singing, a slow chorus in the day and in the night, from the equator to the polar plains.
Children, the voice said, you do not have to be hungry. You do not have to thirst.
Drops of sweet dew fell on their tongues, entering them, and they could see … everywhere and hear everything. They drank from the cat-whisker strands, their hands filling with liquid light, and the native insects clustered near, singing also, tiny voices, an endless sweet liquid chorus.
None need hunger. You came hungry; you came thirsty; you do not need to perish of it. You are perishing by the waters that still live; you are near to perishing by the lifeless waters here. None of you need to suffer. Come to us, children.
She cried in the dream. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. What we did. What we’re doing.”
My daughter, you are very new and very small. What was done before you, you did not do. We are very old, the oldest of the old, and our oldest voices were singing before your forebears first struck stone to stone. How can you learn in a morning not to kill when your voices will be silenced by night? Drink, child, and teach others to drink. You will be of us and sing like we.
In the morning, they walked down to the house. Mum looked at her and Corson, and her mouth was a straight line as she cooked oats and added drops of honey. “Where have you been?” she asked tightly.
“We were up in the barrel trees last night,” Ismarada said. “There’s something you should know—”
“I think I know enough,” Mum said, clapping the lid on the pan. “And with a—with a clone!”
“That’s not what—and it doesn’t matter! I’m twenty!”
“I’m telling your da,” Mum said grimly.
“It doesn’t matter—this is something bigger than that, something important!”
“I can’t imagine what.” She turned off the electric coil under the pan and crossed her arms.
Ismarada suddenly gaped at her mother. What to tell her? That barrel trees talk?
Corson said, “Barrel tree nectar is drinkable and good for you. You aren’t hungry after you drink it. At all.”
Mum stared at him. “Are you defective?” she spat.
He flushed. “No, Miss. When we drink some of it, we aren’t hungry. We aren’t thirsty—”
“Why don’t you go gnaw wirewood, as long as you want to take your life in your own hands. Just leave my daughter out of this.” She grabbed Ismarada’s arm and pulled her behind her. “Get out of my kitchen, clone.”
He was very red, but he took a long breath. “Miss—”
“Mum, when you sleep under the trees, you hear them at night. They talk to you. They are like people, but older and better. They say it’s okay, that the famine can be over.”
“What’s going on?” The elder Manca was in the kitchen doorway, a wrench in his hand. “Vi, what’s this shouting?”
“He was with our daughter. Last night. And they’re babbling about drinking barrel tree nectar like it’s food and water and that the trees can talk, and I don’t know what else.”
He pointed at Corson, then at Ismarada with the wrench, then back. “You—her?”
“Sir.”
“Get out. I’ll take you to town, shift your contract somewhere else.”
“But Da, the trees!”
He pointed the wrench at her. “Be quiet.”
“We’ll show you—you drink it and aren’t hungry. You feel alive—you can hear them—”
He cuffed her, and Corson stood shaking, his hands in fists.
“You, get out, you, go to your room.”
Before noon, he drove Corson to Clytemnestra and returned with a box. Ismarada was cleaning out the pig cote, red-eyed, when she heard the bang. She stepped past the cote, looked around puzzled, and saw a barrel tree tip over.
She screamed and ran up the scree and sliding rocks. “Da, no!”
Bang. Another tree swayed and tumbled. Bang. A third. Bang, bang, bang, bang.
She heard a long, sad note in her mind, filling the world around her with a deep sound. No no no no no she cried out in the singing, oh god no.
She fell and got up and fell and got up and ran and ran. Bang, bang, bang. Bang.
She’d never counted the barrel trees. There were fourteen bangs.
He was calmly putting away the remainder of the charges in the box when she stumbled up.
“How could you?” she gasped, sick and shaking. “How could you?”
“You don’t need to be doing with his kind,” he said. “You’re a born-woman, not one of them. He’s lucky I didn’t take my fist to him. And it’s dangerous to ingest native substances, Ismarada. You know better than that! What doesn’t hurt you now can give you neoplasms later. You don’t need to moon around in native habitats anyway. I’ve let this stand too close to the house too long. All this country will be terraformed in the next few years. It needed to be pulled down. All this—” He waved savagely up and down the valley. “Cropland.”
“Da … da, they wanted to help.”
“You need to grow up, Ismarnjo. No one is going to help us. That’s why we came to this planet: to help ourselves.”
“And we’ve been almost starving for a hundred and fifty years!” she screamed at him. “Da, they were thousands of years old!”
“Tomorrow, I’ll have you go to the worklines,” he said. “I have young folk from Aulis flying in, refugees, and you can show them the valley and work on the irrigations, all right?”
He walked back to the house, and she knelt in the dirt, the sky empty of trees, the ground covered in tumbled, broken aubergine trunks.
There was a long blue tone in her mind and a faraway rustle of distant singing, as if someone had struck her in the middle of the back and left her on the ground.
The night came fast and dark, and she lay on the veranda. Da and Mum were on the roof, talking for a long time, and then they were quiet. She couldn’t sleep, and then Corson came.
“Oi,” he said softly.
“Corson?”
“Yah. Did they hit you more?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“He put charges into the bottoms of the trees, and he blew them all down. Killed them.”
Corson sucked his breath in. “What now?”
“I’m gonna be sent to lay irrigation line, he says.”
“Me, I’m heading into potato country tomorrow.” He sat down and crossed his legs. “But I won’t.”
“No?”
“Nah.” He pulled his knapsack around and patted it. “I’m going up-slope, see if the Upper Plateau is as bad as they say it is.”
“You can’t run away!”
“Watch me.”
“What about your contract?”
“I didn’t sign anything,” he said. “I was born with it, didn’t ask for it. Walk with me a way?”
They walked hand in hand and stopped at the broken barrel trees. They lay there, still majestic, in a pool of muddied water and nectar, the native insects a gentle blue-green glowing cloud, coming and going.
They looked solemnly at the disaster and then heard the distant singing grow in strength and focus.
Children.
“Yes?” she whispered.
Children, you are unhappy.
“He’s killed you!”
Children, we are a small part of the chorus, and our song is carried on. See our little friends flying? They carry away parts of us, and we will be everywhere still. Wherever we have been heard, we still are. What we are, someday a few of our little friends may be, and what they are, we once were. Nothing is lost.
“But you were so beautiful.”
And we still are. Will you drink, children?
“It’s your blood … ”
“We can’t—” Corson said.
It is life. Take it. Drink it.
It was shimmering in the hollows of the stones, and they took handfuls and drank deeply.
“He didn’t know you were thinking beings,” Ismarada said. “I’m so sorry.” She felt the strength inside and heard the music. Corson’s eyes were alight. “No one knows, no one understands.”
It is not necessary for them to know that we sing, the voices said, near and far. It is a very large world, and it is a hard one for you young children. You will never fill it, and the song will not stop. We can’t help you yet. Maybe someday they will hear it, too.
“We shouldn’t have come,” said Corson, bleak.
When you came from the sky, things changed … but every time a pebble tumbles, things change. That is the way.
“What do we do?” Ismarada said.
You will never thirst, and you will never hunger, and everywhere you go, the singing will be in your hearts. Do what you wish.