Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“They can hurt each other!”

“How? If a child is rough, the other children deal with that. If I notice a child bullying, I try to work with that child, the mothers and family, to strengthen better ways.”

Luciente nudged her in the ribs. “Zo, as a child you never played sex with other children? Not ever?”

Connie paced on, frowning. She leaned on the railing of the courtyard. “Oh. Sure.” In fact, her brother Luis had taken her pants down under the porch and poked at her with his fingers, finishing with warnings not to tell Mamб. She had not liked the prodding by Luis, who had kept his own pants on, but it had given her an idea. Casually and a lot more gently, she had begun fooling around together with Josй, her favorite brother, one year and two months younger.

She took care of him often. Luis didn’t have to and he would be off with the boys. She would take Josй by the hand and they would play together. Ninety‑nine games out of a hundred they played with paper dolls, with Josй’s wooden duck, with Luis’s wagon if he left it there, with dolls made out of wild flowers, games of school, of sitting at imaginary tables eating meals of grass soup and scolding babies, of charros, of detectives, of general bang‑bang. But every so often they climbed into the old car up on blocks behind the chicken coop next door and they touched each other where it felt best to touch. They did not need to warn each other not to say anything. Both of them sensed that what felt really good must be forbidden. It was a silent, pleasurable game that had stopped certainly by the time they moved to Chicago. But not one ounce of Connie’s flesh believed it had done her any harm.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Maybe it don’t hurt. But I know if I saw my daughter playing that way, I’d have to stop her. I’d feel so guilty if I didn’t! I’d feel like a bad mother, a rotten mother.”

“How interesting,” Magdalena said politely, with her head cocked. “Our notions of evil center around power and greed–taking from other people their food, their liberty, their health, their land, their customs, their pride. We don’t find coupling bad unless it involves pain or is not invited.” She paused before a closed door. “Come. Watch a lesson.”

Inside, a little boy with red‑brown skin sat curled up in a wooden chair wearing a metallic cap like a gold hairnet. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly as if in sleep. Magdalena cautioned her with a tiny hand to keep quiet. The boy opened his eyes and turned to a screen on which a moving light showed waves that slid evenly across.

“Good, Sparrow! Now without the guide.” An old man sat against the wall like a bag of bones, with only shreds of white hair clinging to his huge skull.

“What is he learning?”

“Pulse and blood pressure,” the boy said. “How do you start in your village?”

“Start what?”

“Inknowing,” the child said wonderingly. “Do you call it different where you come from?”

She turned to Magdalena, who said, “In your day some of it was called yoga, some meditating, some biofeedback, and some had no name at all.”

“We aren’t mad to control,” Luciente said, “but we want to prevent overreacting–heart attacks, indigestion, panic. We want to get used to knowing exactly what we feel, so we don’t shove on other people what’s coming from inside.”

“We want to teach inknowing and outknowing.” Magdalena gestured apology and swept the women gently back into the hall, shutting the door. “To feel with other beings. To catch, where the ability exists–instance, so strongly in you. We teach sharpening of the senses. Coning, going down, how to reach nevel, how to slow at will.”

“What is all that stuff?”

“States of consciousness. Types of feeling.”

“How can you teach somebody to feel? From a book you can learn the multiplication tables. But how can you teach love?”

“But every mother always has. Or failed to.” Seeing something in Connie’s face, Magdalena went on quickly. “We educate the senses, the imagination, the social being, the muscles, the nervous system, the intuition, the sense of beauty–as well as memory and intellect. Anyhow, we try!” She laughed again, that laugh that picked immediately at Luciente and made her grin too. “People here in our bony skulls”–lightly Magdalena rapped on Connie’s forehead–“how easy to feel isolate. We want to root that forebrain back into a net of connecting.” She turned back to Luciente, smiling broadly. “Here comes Jackrabbit with Dawn. By the road, your child grows better and better at the arts of defense. You’ll be feathered when you see the next demo!”

Long‑limbed rangy Jackrabbit came loping through an archway, making high neighing sounds. A brown‑skinned girl with dark braids clung to his neck, laughing with a wide‑open mouth that showed her small teeth. Avid teeth flashed. Arms hung on tight She clung to his neck and laughed and laughed and kicked his ribs with her bare feet. She was about seven, wearing a lavender summer tunic, and she had a scab on her small round, her heavily tanned, her kissable knee. How she laughed, like dry bells, like bells partly muffled, how she laughed: her golden‑brown eyes met Connie’s. Connie’s heart turned in her chest. Her heart sharpened into a dagger and stopped.

“Angelina!” she cried out, and her voice burst from her like a bubble of blood from her mouth. Then she was back in the isolation cell, flat against one wall as if she had been thrown there. She held both hands against her striving chest.

Angelina! Or any brown‑skinned girl child of seven or so with golden‑brown eyes. How did she know what Angelina would look like after three years? She wouldn’t be barefoot in Scarsdale.

Suddenly she assented with all her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett, to Angelina hidden forever one hundred fifty years into the future, even if she should never see her again. For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena. Yes, you can have my child, you can keep my child. Even with your obscenities and your talking cats. She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she will grow up much better and stronger and smarter than I. I assent, I give you my battered body as recompense and my rotten heart. Take her, keep her! I want to believe she is mine. I give her to Luciente to mother, with gladness I give her. She will never be broken as I was. She will be strange, but she will be glad and strong and she will not be afraid. She will have enough. She will have pride. She will love her own brown skin and be loved for her strength and her good work. She will walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse her babies like a woman and live in love like a garden, like that children’s house of many colors. People of the rainbow with its end fixed in earth, I give her to you!

EIGHT

That Monday one of Dr. Redding’s attendants, a stooped, paunchy man with burst capillaries in his nose that marked an alcoholic, came to fetch Connie. As the nurse shuffled the papers to sign her out to the attendant, she could feel the palpable envy around her. It did not matter what she was going to: she was going off ward. Nurse Wright started to grab a coat for her but the attendant said, “Don’t bother. It’s raining cats and dogs. I’ll taken ’em through the tunnel.”

Nurse Wright pursed her lips. “You’d better take a coat anyhow. Somebody else might have to bring the patient back.”

The coat was so long it hung to her midcalves and the sleeves concealed her hands, but she knew better than to complain. She plodded after the attendant, folding the sleeves back so that she could use her hands on the two surviving buttons.

All the old buildings were joined by tunnels through which equipment, supplies, and sometimes patients were shipped back and forth. Occasionally patients with grounds privileges hung out in the tunnels smoking, talking, flirting, finding a dark place to sleep. No one on staff with a rank above attendant ever seemed to use them.

“Hi, Mack, Tomo. How ya doing?” Her attendant stopped to greet two men wheeling a covered cart.

“Hokay, hokay,” the short one said briskly. “How goes with you?”

“Hi, Fats. Man, this place is creepy today,” the younger said. “If it keeps on raining like this, the whole damn place is going to grow two inches of mold.”

“I hate it when it rains every day,” Fats said. “Hey, you got something nice this week?”

“Everything, man. Red devils, yellowjackets, rainbows. Genuine Nepalese hash. The stiffest coke you ever snorted. You don’t go for ups–how about sopors? You dig on them, don’t you, Fats? Real mellow.”

The man with the accent blinked at them with faint contempt and began reading what looked like a sports magazine in Japanese, pulled from his pocket under the white coat. As they bargained, she stood in her huge coat, waiting. The mad are invisible. Neither had any fear she could damage them. Indeed, if she cared to try, she would only hurt herself. Revenge came easily to staff.

“What’s under the tablecloth?” Fats poked the bundle on the cart.

“Old geezer from chronic service.” Mack cast back the sheet. Sharp gaunt face of an old woman. Her dark flinty eyes in death stared straight up with a look of rage. Mack flipped the sheet over her again but it caught on her hooked nose. He had to free it. “Kicked off last night. Got to truck it down to the meat department.”

“Don’t know why the doctors want to cut up every crazy that checks out. When you seen one you seen them all.”

“They got to put something on the death certificate.”

“Heart stopped.” Fats punched Mack in the arm. “That’s the ticket.”

“See you around, man.” Mack started pushing the cart and Tomo hastened to take his position, although the cart was obviously light enough for one to handle.

The last time she had been summoned, they had given her the most thorough physical of her life, and as a side effect treated her old burn and sent her to the dentist for work on her battered teeth. As she was thrust in, she looked at the patients lined up on the chairs as usual: the graceful West Indian, Captain Cream; the tiny black woman, Miss Green; Orville; Alvin, who was white, forty‑two, and perhaps the closest of those she had met in the hall here to being really mad; Mrs. Ortiz, a thin bouncy Puerto Rican woman, who winked at her; and Skip, who had saved her a place beside him.

“What’s coming down today?” she asked him.

“What they fondly call a battery of tests. Rorschachs, draw‑a‑person, sentence completion, WAIS, Wechsler Memory Scale, MMPI–”

She clutched her shoulders. “What do they do to us? Does it hurt?”

“Only when you laugh … I don’t believe it! I’ve been tested since I was eleven. You’ve never had these mothers play with you?”

She shook her head no. “What will happen?”

“Oh, like they ask you would you rather fly a plane or play with dolls. Follow the stereotypes. But why should I have to pretend I’d rather watch a football game than a ballet not to be labeled queer? The first man I ever had sex with was an attendant at Wynmont–that’s a private buzz farm they sent me to when I was thirteen.”

“So young. Why did they do that?”

“My parents thought I didn’t work right, so they sent me to be fixed. You know, you send the riding mower back to the factory to be fixed if you get a lemon. Why not a son?”

“Did you figure out yet what this whole thing is?”

“Some research project, with us as the guinea pigs. But I’m on the case. I’ll break their game soon. Fats is queer on me.”

“That Dr. Redding–I don’t like him. He feels so above us. He’s not even scared of us the way some are–scared of catching what we got. It never occurs to him he might crack.”

“Not Morgan, though. If you stare at him a long time, he starts fidgeting. You can get into staring contests with him, and he gets so he wants to win! But Redding, yeah, he’s too cool. He looks through us to something on the other side he’s aiming at.”

A woman was dumped beside her, a tall lean satin black woman with her hair in a big wild Afro.

“I guess we’re the final winners of their screening,” Connie said to her. “I saw you when they were x‑raying us, but we never met. I’m Connie Ramos.”

“Alice Blue Bottom, honey. You Puerto Rican?”

“No, Chicana. I was born in Texas.”

“No lie? You don’t sound like it. Me, I got myself born in Biloxi, Mississippi. You ever been there?”

She shook her head, “I grew up in Chicago from when I was seven.”

“You know what, girl? I put in five years on the South Side of Chicago working as a cocktail waitress in the Kit‑Kat Club. Left and come to Harlem with a man I stupid to cross the street with.”

“I came to New York to get away from a man I was scared of.”

“Better reason than mine, sugar, though I never been scared of a man in my whole life. I eat them for breakfast two at a time. Why you scared of him?”

“He … forced me. He took my pay check off of me and said he’d give me a little. He bribed the super to let him in my flat–or he just pulled a knife on him, who knows? When I got home from work–I was working in an office then, I had a good job as a secretary to a real estate man, Chicano–he was in my flat.”

“No man ever lay a finger on me I didn’t ask for, cause I tote a shiv, and I know how to use it. I carve up more men than you count on your both hands, didn’t treat me right. You take shit and you is shit, girl. A man good to me, then I good to him. Everybody know that about Alice Blue Bottom.”

“How come you call yourself Alice Blue Bottom?” Skip asked, smiling from under his long lashes.

“Long skinny white boy, don’t you wish you know that?” She tided back her tower of a neck and laughed, with her breasts freely jiggling against the red dress. She had her own clothing, for sure. Some attendant had made her sew up the front a couple of inches with the wrong color thread, but the dress was still shorter and fit better than anything else around. “Cause I’m so black, I’m blue–maybe. No way you gonna find out.”

“That’s Skip,” Connie said. “Do you know anything about this project they’re using us for?”

“Papermaking. That’s all. That’s all they ever doing. You know time you be sitting in that jiveassed group therapy, those doctors thinking how they going to write it all up. How they going to tell it on the mountain at they next staff session. Bullshit!”

Alice’s name was called and she strolled after the nurse, swinging her broad, high ass across the waiting room. An attendant brought Sybil out of the office, and Connie half rose. Sybil saw her at once and their eyes exchanged messages of hope. Fats placed Sybil in a chair far down the line. As soon as Fats turned his back, Sybil hopped up and quietly slid into the seat Alice had just left.

“Sybil, it’s good to see you! I heard they were shocking you?”

Sybil raised an elegant bony hand to her forehead. “I have dreadful headaches. I have trouble remembering words, the names of objects. Yesterday I could not think what one calls the wood around a door! I nearly wept with rage … . What ward are you on?”

“G‑2. Not so bad. Are you still on L‑6?”

“No, D‑5. I wish we were on the same ward. Do you have grounds privileges?”

“Not yet. I’m trying.”

“Hey, you.” Fats marched over to Sybil. “I put you down at the end. Don’t go sneaking away on me.”

“We know each other,” Connie pleaded. Her voice fawned. “We were just talking. Isn’t it good for us to relate?”

“Don’t sweet‑talk me,” Fats said. “You’re all violent or you wouldn’t be here. You do what I say and we’ll get along. Otherwise you’ll be eating dirt.” He marched Sybil down to the chair where he had parked her.

“Are you lovers with each other?” Skip asked her softly.

“No, we’re real good friends. I know her from last time in.” She did not mind his asking, really. Better than thinking it and never asking.

“They almost didn’t include her. I think Dr. Morgan’s scared of big women. But Dr. Redding rode right over him. Said he can handle any of us like day‑old kittens. That’s what he said, that dear man.”

“Ummmm.” She smiled. “I bet he’s never seen Sybil when she’s fighting mad. It takes two attendants to hold her down.”

“I’d like to fantasize about that. But all I seem to hurt is myself.”

“Me too. Except for what got me in here … Listen, Skip, if you entirely hated yourself, you’d be dead by now, right? So part of you does love you.”

He giggled wildly. “What a valentine. Part of me loves me. Signed, some love, Skip.” He unfolded to his feet as Fats came for him.

The next day rain still blew in gusts across the grounds and the porch was too wet to sit on. Sleepy with medication, she went into the day room. Sharma was standing in front of the set, frowning.

“What’s wrong?” she asked Sharma as she shuffled past.

“God damn it,” Sharma said. Something she wouldn’t have said if the attendants had been in earshot Patients were punished for unladylike behavior. “I like this soap opera, ‘Perilous Light.’ I always watch it at home. Anyhow, at one‑thirty I went to ask Richard to unlock the set and turn it to channel five. I waited for half an hour while they yakked. Then they finally let Lois out to her job and they got out the mop–they even lock up the mop!–for Glenda to use. Then Mrs. Stein had a question about her meds. She said the doctor changed it They argued with her for ten minutes. Finally they looked it up. They shuffled papers for ten more minutes. Finally they agreed the doctor signed a change. Then they beat that around for a while. By the time I got Richard to put on channel five, it’s the end of the serial anyhow. There’s this other woman who’s after Maggie’s husband, I want to see what’s happening. It’s like my husband–women are always after him.”

She mumbled sympathy, half out on her feet. The set flickered, giving a cover to sitting in the dim room. She took a chair at the back and nodded out. She was sinking into the stuffy sleep of Thorazine when she felt Luciente’s presence and lurched unsteadily to meet her.

“It’s raining here too,” she said with disappointment in her thickened voice.

“You don’t farm, Connie, or you wouldn’t feel bad about rain.” Luciente peered into her face. “You’re so drugged you’re not quite with me. May I help you?” Luciente put her warm, dry hands beside Connie’s temples and pressed carefully but firmly. She began a series of exploratory pressures over Connie’s head. “Here, sit on the bench.” Luciente spoke to her in a low compelling tone. “Relax, relax. Yes. Open up. Yes. Flow with me. Relax.”

She knew she was being hypnotized and that the iron cage around her brain was lifting. The heaviness slid from her.

“Zo. Better?” Luciente handed her a closely woven hat to keep off the rain, broad enough to protect her shoulders and, unlike an umbrella, not requiring a hand to hold it. Off they started along the slick paths of the village. “Come, we’ll bike to the Grange–a beautiful three‑hundred‑year‑old wooden building!” On the end of the village beyond the fish breeding tanks stood racks of bicycles.

“But I haven’t been on a bike in years! I can’t!”

“Good. We’ll take a two‑seater. I’ll pedal and you’ll do what you can.”

“I’ve seen lots of wooden buildings, Luciente! I’ve seen buildings a lot older than that in Texas.”

“You wanted to see ‘Government.’ It’s working today.”

“The town government? Like a mayor? A council?”

Luciente made a face, throwing her slack‑clad leg over the bike. “Look at it and then we’ll figure out what it’s like, okay?” They set out along a narrow paved way wandering a pleasant route over a high curved bridge across the river, under big and little trees, past roses drooping under the load of the rain, past willows, past boats and corn patches with pole beans and pumpkins interplanted, past the edge of another village marked by a bike rack.

“This is Cranberry,” Luciente said hitting the brakes so they squeaked to a stop. “Everybody’s always making lists of what I ought to show you. Every lug in my base, my mems, everybody at council. Even my defense squad–I’m practicing on my belly and everybody’s giving me lists what I should show you. Harlem‑Black flavor village.”

“I see gardens. Windmills. People. Greenhouses. Where are the huts?”

“Below.” Luciente left the bike by the big maple and helped her off. “We’ll stop by Erzulia.” She used her kenner. “Zuli! It’s Luci. I brought the woman from the past. Meet us at your space to show a Cranberry dwelling, favor?”

“No such,” said a voice that sounded much more like a black from her own time than anybody she’d heard here. “Got a mean pelvic fracture, old person from Fall River. You drop right by my space and show it your own self.”

“Erzulia and Bee are sweet friends,” Luciente said. “Erzulia has tens of lovers. Person never stales on anybody, just adds on. Over there!” She pointed to a two‑story building. “The hospital where Zuli works–hospital for our township. That great big greenhouse is one where they breed the spinners–those single‑celled creatures we use for fences and barriers.”

“Creatures! They’re alive!”

“Fasure. They mend themselves.”

As they walked, she saw that courtyards were dug into the earth the level of an ample story, surrounded by dense, often thorny hedges–blackberries, raspberries. An animal or a child couldn’t push through. At ground level trees grew, gardens flourished, paths wound, swings hung from trees and people trotted and biked by. Goats and cows grazed, chickens ran pecking, a cat played with a dying baby rabbit. The solar heat collectors and the intakes for rain‑water cisterns studded the surface like sculpture, some of them decorated with carved masks, others scalloped, inlaid with shell and glass mosaics.

Luciente led her by the hand down wide steps curving into a submerged courtyard. The yard itself was paved and had in the center a big weather‑beaten table with benches all around and a scattering of chairs. A chess game sat on the table half played, under a clear cover like those Connie had seen put over big cakes. The four walls around the court were of glass threaded with spidery lines almost too fine to focus on.

“The glass can be opaqued or made one‑way,” Luciente explained.

“This whole house belongs to Erzulia?” Maybe they were richer here.

“No! They live in families. Everybody has private space, but they have common space too, for family. For eating, playing, watching holies. The walls are plenty thick for quiet.”

Individual rooms opened onto courts and the courts served partly as hallways and partly as common space. Halls joined rooms on other courts. Luciente guided her through the maze, occasionally consulting her kenner to ask permission to open a door. They cut through a kitchen, where Luciente begged a taste of a hot spicy seafood stew. Only two private rooms were occupied at this time of day. In one, Luciente said, somebody was meditating. On the door was hung a paper hand with the fingers held up.

“That’s what they use when they don’t want you to enter. I say meditating–of course they may be coupling, reading, sleeping, or just pouting.”

Erzulia’s room faced west. It was spacious, with walls entirely covered in woven and embroidered hangings, texture upon texture and color upon color. Her bed was a high platform reached by a ladder, the space underneath closed in with hangings to make a dark cave of cushions, a small altar, shelves of herbs in bottles. The furniture was of a dark knobby substance that reminded her of bamboo. On the bed a strange blue costume was laid out.

“We should not stay here. That’s Erzulia’s raiment.” Luciente used the old formal word.

“Is she a mother getting ready for a naming?”

“Zuli’s never been a mother. Sappho is dying and Erzulia is her friend. They share a sense of old rites. Zuli follows voodoo as a discipline, as many do in Cranberry, while Sappho is an Indian old believer. But they share a closeness to … myths, archetypes.”

“Sappho? That old woman who was telling stories to the kids?”

“The same. A great shaper of tales. Now person is very old. It’s time for per to die.”

“Oh?” She saw the sharp face of the corpse in the tunnel. “I wonder if she’s so sure it’s time.”

“Per body has weakened since Wednesday. Time comes for any fruit to fall. It’s a good death that arrives when you’re ready for it, no?”

They climbed another broad stair to the ground, where the rain was easing and dark clouds scudded over rapidly, going out toward the bay. The air smelled clean and cottony.

In the old white Grange Hall with its octagonal tower, twenty‑five or thirty people sat around an oblong table arguing about cement, zinc, tin, copper, platinum, steel, gravel, limestone, and things she could not identify. Many of them seemed to be women, although she often found when she heard a voice that she had guessed wrong. They ranged from sixteen to extreme old age. Few of them looked entirely white, although their being tanned by the sun made that harder to judge than it might have been in the middle of the winter. They spoke in ordinary voices and did not seem to be speechifying. Behind some seated at the table sat others listening closely and at times putting in their comments and questions.

“We have a five‑minute limit on speeches. We figure that anything person can’t say in five minutes, person is better off not saying.” Luciente and she pulled up chairs to sit behind Otter, whom she had not at first recognized with her black hair in a single braid and her body in overalls splashed with mud and salt. Otter flashed them a smile before turning back to the display set in the table between every other delegate that showed figures, allotments, graphs they were discussing.

“This is your government?”

“It’s the planning council for our township.”

“Are they elected?”

“Chosen by lot. You do it for a year: threemonth with the rep before you and three with the person replacing you and six alone.”

“We want to clear some of the woods on Goat Hill.” A map flashed on the displays set in the table. The person speaking, with sideburns and a bristling mustache, somehow drew on the map indicating the section he referred to. “We would like to increase our buckwheat crop.”

Luciente murmured, “Rep from Goat Hill, Cape Verde flavor village upriver.”

“Seems to me that cuts into the catchment area for rain water. We have none too much water, people,” a person with green hair said.

“We are only thinking of a matter of fifty, sixty acres of second‑growth woods and scrub. Our region imports too much grain, we have all agreed on that,” the mustache argued.

“Without water we can grow nothing. Our ancestors destroyed water as if there were an infinite amount of it, sucking it out of the earth and dirtying and poisoning it as it flowed,” Otter said indignantly. “Let us not be cavalier about water. What does the soil bank say?”

“I’ll direct the question.”

Luciente leaned close. “That’s the rep from Cranberry. That person is chair today.”

“Who’s that with green hair?”

“Earth Advocate–speaks for rights of the total environment. Beside per is the Animal Advocate. Those positions are not chosen strictly by lot, but by dream. Every spring some people dream they are the new Animal Advocate or Earth Advocate. Those who feel this come together and the choice among them falls by lot.”

The computer was flashing figures and more figures on the displays. After everyone had stared at them, the Ned’s Point rep spoke. “The woods in question are fasure catchment. To take these acres from forest would cut our capacity to hold our water table.”

“How can we up our grain output if we can’t pull land from scrubby woods to farming?” the Cranberry rep asked.

“Then we must up the output of the land we have,” the Earth Advocate said. “We’re only starting to find ways of intensively farming, so the soil is built more fertile instead of bled to dust”

Otter was still studying the display, her fat braid hanging over one shoulder. “These woods are birch, cherry, aspen, but with white pines growing up. Will be pine forest in ten years. Its history as we have it is: climax forest, cleared for farming, abandoned, scrub to climax again, bulldozed for housing, burned over, now returning to forest.”

At her ear Luciente murmured, “We arrive with the needs of each village and try to divide scarce resources justly. Often we must visit the spot. Next level is regional planning. Reps chosen by lot from township level go to the regional to discuss gross decisions. The needs go up and the possibilities come down. If people are chilled by a decision, they go and argue. Or they barter directly with places needing the same resources, and compromise.”

A vote was taken and Goat Hill was turned down. The Marion rep suggested, “Let’s ask for a graingrower from Springfield to come to Goat Hill and see if they can suggest how to grow buckwheat without clearing more land. We in Marion would be feathered to feast the guest.”

Luciente’s kenner called. “How long?” Connie heard her say, and then, “We’ll come soon.”

“The old bridge is beautiful,” a middle‑aged man was arguing. “Three hundred years old, of real wrought iron. We have a skilled crafter to top‑shape it.”

“Nobody in your village has bled from the old bridge being out. We need ore for jizers,” an old woman said. “The bridge is pretty, but our freedom may depend on jizers. Head before tail!”

“Weren’t you advised last year to look out for alloys that use up less ore?” the rep from Cranberry said.

“We’re working on it. So is everybody else!”

The Goat Hill rep suggested, “For the bridge, why not use a biological? It’d corrode less. Repair itself.”

“We must scamp now,” Luciente said, pulling her up. “Fast. We’ll hop the dipper.”

“What about the bike?”

Luciente looked at her blankly. “Somebody will use it”

The dipper turned out to be a bus‑train object that rode on a cushion of air about a foot off the ground until it stopped, when it settled with a great sigh. It moved along at moderate speed, stopping at every village, and people got on and off with packages and babies and animals and once with a huge swordfish wrapped in leaves.

They sat down in a compartment with an old man facing them, wizened up like a sultana, fiddling constantly, with a satisfied air, with the blanket wrapped around his baby.