The Breath of Suspension (28 page)

Dalka picked up Sora’s hand and pulled off the sunstone ring Tessa had just transferred there. She smiled grimly. “We want her to look nice, but there’s no reason in your family’s starving for it.” She started to put the ring back in the jewelry case, then turned and put it on, with some difficulty, over Tessa’s thicker finger. “There. As safe a place for it as I can think. A better memory of your momma than putting it under the fleshgrass at Topfield to be dug up by high plainsmen, isn’t it?”

Tessa looked down at the ring and nodded.

Perin knocked. “Please.” He held his hands in fists, an oddly aggressive posture he took in moments of nervousness. He peered over Dalka’s shoulder at his daughter and dead wife, blinking. “The death cart is waiting. We must leave soon if we’re to make Topfield—”

Dalka slapped his shoulder the way one man would another. “Do good by her, will you?”

“I will. Our family is strong enough.”

“I hope you’re right.” She turned to look back at Tessa. In the dimness of the hall her eyes seemed extraordinarily large. “I’ll talk with you later, Theresa.” Tessa and Perin stood and listened to the creak of the stairs beneath Dalka’s bulk.

“Well then. Well then.” Perin stood over his wife’s body and looked down at it as if he had found her napping and was wondering whether to awaken her. His large hands dangled loose at his sides.

Tessa started to move out of the room, to give her father privacy, but paused at the door, overcome by curiosity. Who were these people, her parents, and what had they meant to each other? Perin knelt by his wife’s side and wept bitter unashamed tears, sobbing so hard he sounded like he was hiccuping. He put an arm around her waist and pulled her to him, resting his head on her shoulder and disarranging her hair. Tessa turned her head away, suddenly feeling her intrusion, but not before she saw, with sick shock, that her father’s hand held her mother’s now-cold breast.

Dom and Benjamin stood stony-faced in the hall holding the funeral pallet. The heavy scent of its flowers, woven around the edge by the neighborhood women, filled the hall. It made Tessa dizzy, and she put a hand against a wall to steady herself.

“Come in and get her.” Their father’s voice was muffled. “Come.” With an air of exaggerated dignity, the two boys stepped through with the pallet. The men clustered around their dead woman and Tessa stood in the hall, watching their backs and wondering at their passions.

Like all houses in the Shield’s upper valleys, the Wolholme house had a Death’s Door at the rear, just under the cliff. It was used for the exit of a corpse and no other purpose, so that if the dead got lonely in their grave beneath the fleshgrass of Topfield and tried to return home, the only door they could find would be sealed against them. Characteristically, Perin had lavished great care on this almost-always-useless portal. It was surrounded by dark tiling, and the doors themselves were carved with flowers. The foil-and-wax seal over it tore as Perin pulled back the bolt, and the two heavy doors, perfectly balanced, swung open into the noonday sun.

Dom and Benjamin, strong wide-shouldered boys, carried Sora lightly on her pallet and slid it onto the high spring-wheeled death cart. They looked so manly and serious that Tessa suddenly felt overwhelmingly proud of them.

A few of their neighbors stood among the trees to bid farewell, but most of the people of Calrick Bend would wait, prudently, until the Wolholmes returned from the burial, their success in carrying the body to its final resting place a reaffirmation of their strength as a family.

The cart was ancient and motorized, a common property of the communities of this length of Cooperset Canyon. Parts of it were rumored to have come, centuries ago, from Earth itself. They climbed aboard and hummed up-canyon.

❖

Calrick Bend’s community cemetery was at Topfield, in the dry, high valleys that backed up against Evening Crest.

Funerals were always performed by members of the deceased’s family, a significant test of their strength, stamina, and solidarity. Failure to bury a dead family member at Topfield was an indication that the family could no longer maintain itself or its holdings.

Where Sterm Canyon split from Cooperset the road became rough, climbing the dry bed. Coiling tubes emerged from the red rock, turgid with the water they had sucked from deep aquifers, but no one farmed here, and only native Koolan plants grew. The canyon walls were defaced by old mining operations. Metal was rare anywhere on Koola, but particularly here on the Shield, a continent of light rock that rose up out of the dense atmosphere of the flats that made up the rest of the planet’s surface. The embedded remains of heavy asteroids, a possible cause of the Shield’s existence, were the only source of metals.

Tessa remembered the story of the Prochnows, who, weary, riven with internal dissension, had spent a week taking their father’s body to Topfield, or so they announced when they returned with the cart. A few weeks later a hunter found the father’s body hidden in an old excavation here in Sterm Canyon, at least two days’ travel from Topfield, which they had never reached. The Prochnow family had been unable to survive the disgrace and had vanished as an organized unit. Better to die, Tessa thought. Better to die in the heights of Evening Crest, lungs drying in the merciless Koolan air, than have the Wolholmes end that way.

“Mother came here to hunt her stone bugs,” Dom said, half sorrowful, half contemptuous. Indeed, the exposed rock layer flanking the jolting track was dense with a tangle of ancient Koolan seafloor life.

“She wanted to understand where we come from,” Tessa said. The men in the family had never understood Sora’s paleontological hobby. But that wasn’t fair: Tessa had never understood it either. Now it seemed overwhelmingly important that she do so.

“We didn’t come from here,” Benjamin jeered, with the selfconfidence of the possessor of an inarguable school-approved fact. “We came from Earth.”

Tessa eyed him. “I remember when the midwife pulled out a little screaming lump and Poppa named it Benjamin. So I can tell you that you didn’t come from Earth. Any further claims?”

“You know what I mean,” Benjamin began heatedly.

“This is no time for fighting,” Dom cautioned.

“Tell
her
that.”

“No need,” Tessa said with deliberate serenity. “No need, Earth-man.”

“I met her here,” Pcrin said dreamily, as if his children weren’t fighting around him.

“Momma?” Tessa said, argument forgotten. “Here in Stcrm Canyon?”

Perin nodded. “She was trying to free a fossil. I heard her swearing before I saw her. She thought she was alone and was embarrassed when she saw me. But I helped her.”

Tessa could almost see the scene: her impatient mother, young, at a disadvantage, but unwilling to reject the help, and Perin’s large, careful hands working a chisel around the delicate trapped fossil as he glanced, thoughtfully, at the odd woman he had unexpectedly cornered.

“Which fossil was it?” Tessa asked.

He frowned. “I don’t remember. It wasn’t very large. Kind of lacy. I’m sure it’s still in the collection somewhere.”

“And why were you here?” Dom and Benjamin leaned forward while Kevin dozed, curled up with a hand over his face. Her brothers were equally interested in the answers, but were willing to let her ask all the questions.

“A funeral, what else?” He looked up Sterm Canyon toward the cliffs that marked its end. “My mother’s, then. I had let the cart with my family go ahead, and was walking alone. After then, your mother walked with me.”

“You persuaded her to come with you?” Tessa was distressed to hear the tone of doubt in her voice. But how had the gentle, shambling Perin persuaded the intent Sora to leave her task, her joy, and come with him?

For the first time since his daughter had come home, Perin smiled, remembering. “No, Tessa. I wanted to go ahead alone. I had just stopped to help, nothing else. It was she who insisted on coming with me.”

Clearly unwilling to answer any further questions, Perin settled back, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. But traces of the just-passed smile remained on his face.

Before climbing to Topfield they spent the night at the funeral encampment, an open area around a water seep. One other family, with the body of a young child, stayed at the opposite end of camp, but the two families did not speak. In the morning, by unspoken agreement, the Wolholmes moved out at first light, taking the death cart as far as the base of the switchback Topfield trail.

Just where the trail rose toward its first switchback was a pair of giant fossil trilobites, each about two meters long. An entire five-meter layer of the cliff face was filled with such fossils, but these were by far the largest, flanking the path like guardians. Centuries of human hands touching them for luck had rubbed them smooth. Her mother had particularly thought of them as lucky, Tessa remembered, representatives of the native Koolan forces that the human settlers had yet to come to terms with. At home was a photograph of a four-year-old Tessa perched on one, smiling nervously.

It was a long heavy climb up the trail, trading off the weight of the pallet and their mother’s body. The spiky plants along the trail twisted slowly when they sensed the moisture of the human beings. Tear-drinking flies, a symbol of funerals, settled on their cheeks to reclaim some salty water. After several hours’ climb, Tessa leaned out and looked down the cliff face to the canyon below. The tiny figures of the family with the dead child were just commencing their climb. Their heads were down, concentrating on each step.

The cliff edge was sharp. One moment the Wolholmes were climbing desperately up the face, breath sharp in their lungs, the next they stood on the wide fleshgrass-covered expanse of Topfield. Fleshgrass lived on the bodies buried beneath it. When this barren high valley had become Calrick Bend’s community cemetery, there had been only sparse clumps of it here and there on bare dirt. Now it lapped up at the distant hills as if desperate to climb toward the higher mountains that loomed beyond.

Dom led the family a long way into the valley before finding a spot, no different than any other, that satisfied him. The flesh-grass was thick under their feet. Dom, Benjamin, and Tessa pulled out the folding shovels that had been stowed under the pallet and marked the grave. Kevin had brought, on his own, a toy shovel and with childish concentration straightened the line of his older siblings’ cut.

The soil beneath the fleshgrass was loose and easy to dig. It didn’t take long to empty a hole deep enough for their mother. The roots would grow through her in days. As far as Tessa knew, clothes and jewelry would remain below, for all the tales she’d heard of wedding rings being found waving on fleshgrass fronds. It was also said that high plainsmen sometimes descended from their encampments beyond the Boss and dug through the ground seeking valuables.

They slid Sora’s body off the pallet into the ground and covered her over. Tessa turned away as her mother’s still face vanished beneath the dry gray soil.

“We’ll survive, Sora,” Pcrin said, kneeling by the grave, “just like I promised you.”

Benjamin made an inarticulate sound in his throat and pointed. They all looked up.

No more than a hundred meters away stood a Great Wapiti, a huge quadruped, two meters at the shoulder, with curving knife-edged horns. It was a native of Koola, though had been given some approximate name from an animal of old Earth.

“My God,” Dom muttered. “It’s so close. So close!”

The wapiti stalked along, graceful and powerful, as if aware of their impotence and the solemnity of their task. At last, coming near a rock slope, it crouched and, with an incredible leap, vanished.

Benjamin looked after it. “Look!” He pointed. “A troop of high plainsmen. You can just see their horses. They must be hunting the wapiti.” Tessa squinted to see what he saw.

Dom didn’t even bother to glance up from pulling the fleshgrass over the grave. “Don’t be ridiculous. The Plateau is hundreds of kilometers farther, beyond the Boss. That’s the face of Evening Crest, Ben, and there aren’t any plainsmen there. You’re imagining things.”

“Am not.” Benjamin thrust his lower jaw out in a gesture Tessa remembered her mother making while arguing with Perin.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tessa said. “We have to get back to funeral camp before dark.”

So they turned and left Sora there beneath the grass.

❖

The funeral ceremonies had been, in their own way, more strenuous than the climb to Topfield. First there had been the argument over which symbol of their mother’s would be included in the Wolholme family ward. Tessa hadn’t quite dared suggest a trilobite fossil from the collection, and had found Perin’s final, and inarguable, selection, Sora’s favorite pair of pruning shears, eerily correct, despite its inadequacy. Tessa had tried to pick a fight without telling Poppa what it was about, but he had not risen to the bait, as Sora surely would have, and merely stuck his thick Wolholme fingers partway through the fine handles and clumsily clicked the blades to show by the mismatch how well they had, in contrast, fit Sora’s hand.

And after the attachment of the shears to the upper part of the ward, there had been the feast at long tables under the low-hanging branches of the family dilberry grove. All the families of Calrick Bend had sent representatives, even the most-high Dalhousies and Minishkins, some closer friends arriving with all generations. Tessa and her brothers had worked desperately to feed them all the spicy-sweet cakes that were always served at this event and no other. Dom claimed his butt had forgotten what a chair felt like. But their weariness was good, a prelude to relaxation, for the family would survive. Momma lay properly at Topfield, and the Wolholmes were back in their fields and groves.

Now Tessa sat alone under those dilberries, right at the side of the ward, and tried to think things through. She mended clothing as she considered, having learned long ago from Momma that no one would task her for wasting time on thought if she seemed to be doing something useful.

The ward was a tower of family symbols, and one stood beside each house, a sign of the family’s persistence. Some wards had bases of mysterious silvery metals brought from Earth, metals poor Koola could no longer make. And more than one ward rested on a vivid green-blue sphere representing that far-away planet, Mother of All. The Dalhousies, for example, had been big on Earth, and wished this known. For all Tessa knew, they had owned that planet and come to Koola only on holiday, to be stuck here by an unexpected change of interplanetary transport schedule.