Where Grow the Barrel Trees
Part 3
The dreams came without politely waiting for their eyes to close. Arms and legs around each other for warmth, skin to skin, they lay on the blanket with the heat rapidly dissipating from the stones and clay, passing through them and away. The barrel trees shone dully in the moonlight, and the stars were shimmering and liquid. A satellite tracked, bright and swift, its gaze questing for cloud and rain far below.
Locked together, cheek to cheek, he felt what she had felt, that they were inverted and all the universe lay below them, spread out in a map with a cool, mighty flowing river of stars beneath them. He saw, she saw, they saw Arcturus, Epsilon Indi, Antares, Sol, Altair, Spica. Saw them, heard them, thin crystal notes, tingling waves, piping voices among ten thousand others. His fingers were in her hair, and her hair was stars.
There were closer voices, closer roots in them, under them, around them. Children, children, they sang. Children, children, children.
She reached up, the terraformer’s daughter. The whiskers from the base of the trees were alight with glowing semi-insects, their bodies gleaming with green luminescence, their tongues wrapping the clear drops of honeydew. It was sticky on her fingers, and the insects cruised her chafed skin, gently drinking. Corson watched, captivated, as they descended to her face and danced, the nectar flowing over her, into her, swift and free as wine.
Children, children, the voices said.
“Yes?” she said.
“Yes?” he said.
Drink and do not thirst or hunger. Listen, and look, and dream.
Drops of dew fell on their tongues, the whiskers twining and waving in a most unplant-like way.
“Are you seeing this?”
“Are we dreaming?”
Their words were as large as worlds and burst like bubbles.
Dream, the voices said all around. Dream.
The stars changed, the river of light rippled, and unfamiliar patterns rose and fell away. No star was a neighbor for long in the galactic whorl, and still, the trees swayed and grew, and wind came cold and warm. Night came and went a million times, rushing and soothing until the images passed from their minds, and they slumbered deeply.
In the morning, they sat naked in the dawn, and a starving jackal was on a rock twenty meters away, but it slunk off. Their faces were sticky with the beads of sweet ichor that had fallen on them from the trees at night. She trickled water from her bottle, washed her face, braided her hair, and dressed.
“What did you dream, Miss?” he asked.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Call me Ismarada.”
“Ismarada. I dreamed … I don’t know what I dreamed.”
“I know. I dreamed it, too.”
“Have you dreamed it before?”
“I think so.”
“Here?”
“Right here.”
He stood and slowly put on his underwear, jumpsuit, and work boots, buttoning the seams. He looked around. The slopes looked ordinary. Regolith. A few alien plants. Invasive grass, dandelions, and plantain in places where their seeds had fallen.
She put her arm in his, and they stood close, listening.
“There’s something … ” she said.
“A sound.”
“Like … a hum?”
At the edge of hearing, not a sound, not a hum exactly. A … presence. A touch.
“Are you hungry?”
He shook his head. “No. Are you?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t eat yesterday.”
He touched one of the trees. Hard, rubbery, slightly flexible in the skin, rigid aubergine, and about the same color. “Your da will be back soon, and your mum.”
“God, we don’t need them to think—”
He grinned, and she kissed him. “Hurry, then,” he said. “Or your da will send me somewhere else.”
Back to the house, and before noon, she had the garden done, and he had watered the orchard of young fruit trees clinging to the edge of life, their sere little slender leaves trembling with coming death. We’re building a world, he sang to himself, the crèche song he’d learned in the solemn clone nursery school. We’re building a world, grain by grain, leaf by leaf, hill and plain. Fish in sea and bird in air, someday soon we will be there. We’re building a world, grain by grain …
The pig grunted happily with her milled artificial carbofeed. Her babies squealed, snatching at the brown nuggets. “No breakfast slops today,” Ismarada apologized. “We aren’t eating.”
We aren’t eating. For a moment, she wondered why, but not feeling hungry was such a luxury that she didn’t want to question it.
The truck came back from Clytemnestra. Da looked worn, Mum grey.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“Well enough,” he said. “The ephor is asking people to help with the potato harvest so we can ship as much as possible to Aulis. The rain’s late again, so they may lose ground on the famine. Not as bad as it was,” he tried to sound cheerful. “But not as good as they hoped they’d be.”
Her face fell. “All right,” she said. “Should I come?”
“Mum’s packing a bag, and Corson will come. Someone has to watch White-ears and her babies, or she’ll just eat them. The garden has to grow. It’ll be all day. All night. Then tomorrow. We’ll be back after. So.”
“All right.” She hated digging potatoes anyway, dirt under her nails, and there wouldn’t be enough water to wash with. “I’ll stay.”
She made lunch for them, and they didn’t notice she and Corson didn’t take any,
She and Corson kissed and fumbled behind the sheds, and then the truck left for the potato farms north of Clytemnestra.
She did the chores, washed the dishes, took a shower as she washed her clothes in a bucket, and sat in a chair under the eaves until she dried off. She felt … content. Not hungry at all, and the air she breathed felt as good in her lungs as any meal she’d ever had.
She almost forgot to put on her clothes again but got dressed and walked without boots to the barrel trees and sat at the base of one, idly plucking dried honeydew drops like berries and eating them one by one. She’d had berries before, little black-blue ones, but these were better.
The tree against her back was firm, and she was sure it was singing. She hummed with it, droning high and low. A terran hornet, vainly seeking spiders to sting and bury, perched on her knee, gazed with a thousand eyes and moved on. She leaned back under one of the quivering spines, and a trickle of fluid ran over her lips into her mouth. She smiled. Alcohols, esters, complicated molecules. Unaccountably, she could taste their patterns on her tongue like hearing words in her ears.
The songs and the words were very clear now.
Why do you work so?
“Because we’re hungry,” she said sleepily, wondering if her skin would burn in the sun if she drowsed off or if she was past that happening to her now.
Were you always “hungry”?
“Always,” she agreed. “It was hard back there,” she said, wondering if she was talking to herself. “There was war. There weren’t many people anymore. The governments were bad.”
War. There was a gentle parting of her thoughts as though a tendril slipped between one idea and another in her mind. Government. Invisible root-fingers sank into her memories. Unbidden, the image of the scrawny ephor and his tablet came to her, looking over his glasses with thoughts of numbers and rules.
You came out of the sky because you were “hungry”.
“Yah, I guess so.” The barrel tree was warm, and the sand under her toes fed light and strength into her.
“Hunger” came with you, and “government”. A disappointed feeling made her feel shame. There is no “war” yet, but you always travel with it, too.
Confused classroom images of spearmen, pyramids, Romans, Nazis, guerilla armies, burned-out cities, and gutted space stations slipped out of her mind to where anyone could see.
The feeling of oneness with the voices around faded and withdrew. She strained with her mind and hands for it. “Don’t go,” she begged.
Child, child. We must think. Then, the song was closed to her.
She got up and tearfully walked back home. The ground was hot under her feet. She felt a little hungry.
Part 5