Where Grow the Barrel Trees
Part 2
Da took Corson up the valley the next day, surveying barren lands and setting off charges in the ground to map the aquifer. She helped Mum with the garden, keeping the drip irrigation going and picking off Terran insects to keep the vegetables happy. There was gruel for breakfast, bread for lunch, aquaculture fish and rice for dinner, and not too much of any of it, but she knew that the Western Hemisphere had it worse, and she didn’t complain. It was hot, and Mum went on the roof of the house and fell asleep after sunset. Ismarada took a blanket up to her barrel trees and laid down at their bases in the middle of the grove. Someday, she’d have to worry about snakes, scorpions, and insects, but all she had to worry about now was waking up cold in the middle of the night.
The stars were brilliant, the Milky Way spilled down heaven, and she lay on the blanket in her shorts and T-shirt, arms and legs sprawled around like a lanky colt. The barrel trees rose around her, quivering in the evening winds that sifted sand around her bare feet and nerveless fingers. She smiled at them, and her eyelids dropped shut.
The dreams were slow and subtle. In them, her trees leaned over her protectively, like she was an egg in a nest. They were close and strong, and in her dream, they made faint noises, deep, slow purring patterns, trickles in the back of her mind like cool flowing water. Each tree had a different note, and she felt like she was comfortably rooted in the ground by the shoulder blades as they sang, drinking strength from the soil.
The next morning, she woke as the sunlight spread down the valley. She sat cross-legged, trying to remember her dreams, but they eluded her. At the ends of the whiskers at the barrel tree bases, she saw tiny new honeydew drops leaking. Lacy native insects drifted around them, touching them with slender proboscises. The bits of colored lace drifted around her head, legs trailing.
She was hungry and thirsty, and disregarding her advice to the clone, she touched the nearest whisker. It trembled, and the drops ran down the whisker and onto her fingers, rapidly flowing into a golden pool in her palm. She touched her tongue to it. It was sweet and thinner than she expected, and she sipped it from the cup of her hand. There was a thick wine odor, like the stuff Mistr’ Valljet fermented from fruit scrap and sugar beet tops, and a flavor which she couldn’t quite place, but she felt fortified and awake as if she had eaten well for three meals straight and slept in a good bed.
She stood up, slipped on her tire sandals, and touched the gnarled, purplish flesh of the barrel trees. “Thank you, trees!” she said, folded her blanket, and ran down the hill.
Mum was making a meager rice meal with a dribble of oil and some raisins. “How’d you sleep, dear?” she asked. Her eyes were circled. “I couldn’t get a wink—first the heat in the house, then the cold night wind.”
“I slept fine,” Ismarada said. “I slept in the barrel trees.”
“Ground’s hard, child. It’s all clay and rocks.”
“I was fine.”
“If it works for you,” Mum sighed. “Sit and eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “You eat it. You never feed yourself enough.”
“Sweetie—”
“Is Da coming back today?”
“I think so.”
Without breakfast, she took the hour-long walk down the slope to the road. There was something … different about the day. She felt energetic, not hungry. The oppressive heat that built swiftly out of the cold night didn’t seem to drag at her as much as it usually did.
Da told her it would get better when the valley was full of plants and moist soil and had woods on the slopes. “It won’t get as hot during the day or as cold at night,” he said. “That’s why we’re building the world—making it more what it could be for human beings.” She tried to imagine what it would be like. She was used to this landscape of rock and rubble and isolated plant patches, the jagged, naked cliffs behind rising above the slope to the edge of the continental mass. Half a billion years ago, she’d have been under half a kilometer of water. Now, the world was red and raw and looked almost edible. She reached down and scooped up the dust. It smelled … delightful. She touched her tongue to it. Gritty. Salty.
She’d been raised here. Da grew up on the other side of the world where humans had been terraforming for decades, but she didn’t remember the young woods and green fields and the riverbeds of reeds and the newness of Terran life spreading along the shores of the Big Ocean. Clytemnestra was new, untamed, a bare, dried-out seabed. Da had taken her out when she was little, and they found stone shells of bizarre shapes and billion-year-old worm tracks fossiled on layers of shale.
“Will it be sea again?” she asked, wide-eyed. “Is that what we’re doing?”
“Never,” he said. “But maybe we’ll bring the Little Ocean alive again someday!”
Now … now it didn’t seem to matter.
She stood on the beaten dirt road, breathing the thin, dry, up-slope air. It was thin high up there, and you had to take air tanks on the Plateau. At the crossroads, there was the old science-station milestone carved in one of the languages they’d given up, and she sat on it, drinking in the sunshine and feeling stronger by the minute. In the distance, she saw a dust cloud coming from the plain where there wasn’t a real road but a path that trucks could take without breaking an axle on the regolith. She narrowed her eyes. It looked like the white Biosphere Corps van.
She waved, and it slowed, the thin, sifting dust blowing over her. Da rolled down the window, and he and Corson looked out, doused in sweat.
“Hi, Da!”
“Hi, Pillbug,” he said, leaning out. “Come to meet me?”
“Yah! Hi, Corson.”
“Miss.”
Da squinted at her, his sandy hair grey with dirt. “Get in; you’ll give yourself heatstroke.”
“I don’t feel it.”
“That’s the worst kind.”
She climbed into the cargo cabin behind them. The flywheel picked up, and he wrenched the steering bar.
“Mum ok?” he asked as she settled between metal equipment cases. “She convoed yesterday that she felt sick from the heat. Said the air felt like fire in her lungs. I worry about her getting the Fever.”
“She’s tired, but I gave her my breakfast and walked down here,” she said. “La, la, what a good sleep I had last night! Such dreams.”
He looked over his shoulder at her, and she looked at the back of Corson’s head. “About what, Pillbug?”
“I don’t know. I felt like I wasn’t lying on the ground, but like I was under the world, and space was under me, and I was just part of it like it was all upside, and I had roots, somehow.”
“You were just dreaming that because you were sleeping on the roof and fell asleep looking at the stars,” he said.
“Nah, I slept in the barrel trees,” she said. “They felt so cool last evening, but when the heat went, they felt warm.”
He looked at her again. “Huh. People have funny dreams sleeping on the open ground up there,” he said. “Jock Fohn went mad,” he added. “Wandered off and drank bad water. He said he thought he was a tree and it wouldn’t hurt him. Killed his kidneys, and he died later.”
“I won’t drink bad water, Da.”
“Yah, but there’s wirewood further up-slope. You go sleepwalking: that’s a nasty way to wake up and a slow way to die.”
She almost said I’m not afraid of wirewood, but she held her tongue because everyone was afraid of wirewood, and she didn’t want to be forbidden.
“I’ll be careful, Da,” she said instead. “Sorry.”
He yanked the steering bar and guided them around a hole in the faint road. “Be careful,” he echoed her.
“Corson work hard?”
“Corsons’s a good worker. I’m glad we got him.”
“Thanks, sir,” he said.
He set Corson to repair the pig-cote wall, and she gave the mama pig waste food, what little there was, as the shoats grunted and squealed. Then Da drove down with Mum in her best jumpsuit to Clytemnestra because an air-car was coming down-coast from the stations and settlements in the north with some government dignitary from the provisional council. “Cadging free meals, likely,” he said. “But anyone from the western hemisphere would, wouldn’t they?”
They were left alone to mend the wall and weed the garden, and she saw Corson couldn’t look away when she bent over.
“What are you thinking about?” she laughed.
“Nothing, Miss,” but she felt she knew.
At day’s end, she still wasn’t hungry, and he had no appetite for food. There was a red-stained shower stall set up by the garden with cool water piped from a shallow iron and sulfur water spring, and she stripped off and got into it. The water came down like those rare rains that made the desert bloom scarlet and gold and white and blue. It poured down her face, arms, and legs, carrying the dust, sweat, and pig smell away, trickling down through wood floor-slats and into the tomato plants. Her dry skin drank in the water a lot like she was a plant herself. Corson stepped in with her, wiry and bare, with narrow hips. He shook his head like a lion shakes its mane on the savano, and they looked at each other in the twilight as the sun set, water across their faces dripping from their chins, sharing the hard bar of soap.
Wrapped in towels and carrying their clothes, they took a blanket to the barrel trees. Artume had risen nearly full, and the littler moon Neith soon after, so the desert was silvery aglow with an eerie near-daylight as she and he twined under the stars.
Part 5