Remnant Population (6 page)

Between squalls, the air lay heavily around her, moist and intrusive as an unwanted lover. She splashed through the puddles, aware of odd noises from a distance. Was that oncoming wind rushing in the forest? Were those squeaks and grunts from wind-bent wood, or animals? In her own house, the scent of all those vegetables and fruits was overpowering in the damp warmth. She found a handlight, and went around the house checking the shutters, barring them with the heavy boards needed in storms. Then the kitchen door, the outside louvered door and the inside solid one. She came in through the door to the lane, and shut the louvered outer door, latching it firmly. She would leave the inner door open until later, when the wind came that way.

She had time to make more flatbread, fry onions and fresh vegetables to eat with it, and eat a peaceful supper, before the next squall came with a blast of wind that forced a draft through the kitchen door. Just try it, she thought to the storm. She and Humberto had built the house solidly, and kept it in repair. It had held in worse wind than this.

She went to bed in the squall, and fell asleep, hardly waking when one squall followed another with breathless pauses between. In the morning, no light filtered through the double shutters. She didn’t need to look to know that the main storm pressed on the village now. She could hear the howl of the wind between the buildings, feel the drafts squeezed through every crevice by that immense force. She turned on the lights, glad that they still worked. They had worked in other storms, but she remembered from her childhood on another world that the power plants could fail in storms. It was strange to feel so hot and breathless, with all that wind outside, and those little drafts tickling her feet like mice. She made herself fix a breakfast she didn’t really want, one of the golden melons from someone else’s garden. She hoped she would smell it less once she had eaten it, but the cloying scent hung in the air. She could open a window on the downwind side. She went back in the bedroom, and opened the inside shutters. The smell of melon followed her, oozed past her out the window. She stepped into the corner of the room, then jumped as a bolt of lightning struck nearby, the white light spearing in through the louvers; the crack of thunder sounded as if someone had hit her head with a shovel. She could stand the heavy smell of melon better than that. When her breath steadied, she closed the inner shutters and lay down on the bed. The bed did not feel safe enough. Reluctantly, she got up, and dragged off the bedspread and pillows. The closet would be airless, but safe from lightning. She made a nest there, and curled up.

The noise increased; the wind began to seem like a live thing, a demon determined to get to her and rip her apart. Ofelia cowered into the nest of bedclothes and pillows, trying to force herself into sleep. It didn’t work; it had never worked. Every crash of thunder brought her alert, her breath short. Every new noise meant something wrong — something loose to blow against the doors and windows, something unmended that could break and let the storm in.

Phrases she had not said in years came to mind, prayers her grandmother had taught her, that she herself had said. In the storm it was easy to believe in powers and spirits. She had given all that up when she married Humberto; he had not so much forbidden it as ignored such concepts out of existence. Later, when they were trying to apply for a colony slot, he’d put “none” in the blank for religion and Ofelia hadn’t argued. Away from her family, here with others who expressed no superstitions, whatever they believed, with no structure to support her, the last of her childhood faith had frayed away to nothing. She murmured the phrases now, stumbling over forgotten words, but comforted nonetheless. She dozed and woke in jerky alternation, miserable in the cramped stuffy closet, until she fell asleep at last, to waken in eerie silence.

Never go out in the middle of the storm. She had known that; she had always obeyed. She had made her children stay inside too, though she had heard, through the tight-shut doors, the wondering cries of other people and their children, and the scolding voices of those who sent them back inside. Was it day or night? Was this the storm’s center, or the storm’s end? She peeked out of the closet and saw only the motionless rooms, lit by electricity as usual. Slowly, grumbling at the pain in her joints — always worse in these storms — she crawled out of the closet and clambered to her feet. If it was the storm’s middle, it would come back from the other way, which meant she should not open the bedroom shutters. The door to the lane, rather… She took one step and another across the chill, damp floor, listening for any returning threat. Far in the distance, thunder muttered. That meant nothing, either way.

She opened the inner door. It had been soaked by rain driven through the outer, louvered door. It dripped onto the floor, leaving a track of water. Now she could see that it was lighter outside. She slid the latch aside, and pushed the outer door. Rain-swollen, it did not budge until she hit it with her right hip. Even then, she had to shove hard to get it open; the little tree by the front door had blown down onto it. Outside, a pale clear light filled the street, showing ditches abrim with moving water, and mud streaks down the lane. Ofelia looked up. Far overhead, a circle of clear blue… and all around, the wall of cloud, its tops brushed gold by the rising sun. Just as she’d been told, just like the pictures. But different, when she herself was out in it, her feet in the slick mud, and no one to tell it to. She could go over to the center for the second half of the storm; she would be as safe there, or safer. But she wanted to see it come, wanted to see how fast it would come.
Dangerous
. The old voice said that, in the warning tones of her childhood. It could kill her, this storm, as easily as she swatted slidebugs or snapped slimerods. She should go back inside, hide in the closet again. She stepped away from the house, eyeing the cloud to the east. It seemed no closer. Another few steps, and she stood in the lane, where she could look eastward down the length of it, and see that all the houses were standing. Her garden fence was down, and had taken with it all the tomatoes. Cornstalks lay flat, all pointing toward the forest. In the distance, she heard the animals.

The cloud wall looked closer, but it was hard to tell. She would like to wait until it reached the shuttle field, even the last houses at the end of the lane. Surely she could run back to the house in time. The wind would come from behind the house this time; the house itself would shield her. She went eastward a few steps, feeling almost as naughty as when she first went naked. Then she backed up. It would be stupid to meet a sea-storm like this, in the open. Lightning flickered, in the wall cloud; when she looked, she could see that the far side of the open space was definitely farther away, and the east side nearer.

It was so beautiful. She had always liked the pictures of such storms from space, the graceful spirals of white cloud on blue water, but she had not imagined how beautiful it could be from within. Every shade of blue and gray and purple in those walls of cloud, the gold tops now white as day brightened, the clear deep blue above. She had no words for what she felt, as the beauty contended with fear, and she took a few steps forward and then back again, in the cool mud that soothed her feet. Then the wall of cloud loomed over her; the end of the lane vanished in a howl of water and wind, and she fled into her house, fighting through the writhing limbs of the fallen tree, as the first gust slammed against the other side of the house. That vision of silent gold and white and blue shifted in an instant to gray rain, wind, and intolerable noise.

She stood by the door, holding it open a crack, to watch. She could feel the house shudder with the winds blows, but she had no desire now to retreat to her safe closet. Hour after hour she watched the rain stream by, watched it thrash the houses opposite. When her feet ached too much, she brought a chair near the door and sat. All day the wind and rain… but gradually it eased, the wind blowing less and less, the gusts more sharply separated from each other. By nightfall, squall succeeded squall again, with a steady, slower, wind between them.

The rain continued, a steady downpour. Ofelia slept that night on the bed, leaving a light on in the kitchen for no reason she could name, except it made her feel better. The room seemed breathless again, too full of the smells of the harvest, already musty from damp. She could not open the shutters in that rain, but she left the front door propped open. Her sleep was broken by dreams of water: waterfalls, rivers, tears streaming from stone faces, leaks in the roof, burst pipes. Each time she woke, certain that the dream was real, only to find herself safe in bed, and no damper than the air itself would make her. In the morning, rain fell from high gray clouds, steadily as misery but without violence. Occasional squalls hustled past, a roil of lower, darker clouds and gusty winds, but in the east she could see a few patches of blue sky. Heat wrapped her, and moisture. She pushed her way past the fallen tree to the lane, and let the rain wash the sweat off her body. It felt warm, hardly cooler than her blood, and she put back her head and drank it in.

She could see no real damage to any of the buildings, though she did not check all of them that day. First to the center, where the essential machines had gone on as if the storm meant nothing. Perhaps it didn’t mean anything to machines. The air smelled faintly of machine oil, and more strongly of damp and mold. Ofelia turned blowers on, to circulate the air in the sewing rooms. She remembered the last big sea-storm, when the needles had rusted and they had had to polish them again. In the last light, she carried across to the center the most strongly scented of the harvest. She would not have to smell melons again tonight. That night, when a last squall shook the shutters, and bright light spiked through them, she lay in her bed and wondered why she had ever feared it. Her body felt heavy, but new, washed clean by the rain. When thunder rumbled, she felt it in her chest and belly; it shook her bones. It reminded her of Caitano. She was a wicked old woman, and she deserved to die. The old voice scolded her, scolded her naked skin and her discoveries of herself. Beautiful, the new voice said. She had no more words than that, but the visions flashed, one after another: the dark rain, the winds, the tall clouds rising to the light. She dreamed of castles and stars and the mountains she had never seen. Tomatoes and corn were gone completely; most of the beans turned pale yellow and drooped: they had drowned. Along the edge of the garden, squash vines lifted ruffled fanlike leaves, unmarred by the assault of wind and water. Ofelia pushed the welter of tomato vines back off the paths, pulled the cornstalks for the compost, and went on to check other gardens. Anything tall had gone; anything low and leafy had survived. Some fruit trees still stood; others had been uprooted.

Checking the animals meant a muddy trek into the pastures. The sheep had drifted before the first onslaught of the storm into the brushy edge between grassland and forest; she found their muddy track. She followed it, and found most of them, fleeces waterlogged, nibbling dispiritedly at the native vegetation. She drove them back to grass with a stick, wondering again why the gengineers had done nothing about sheep stupidity. Surely any animal so stupid that it would gnaw on brush it could not digest, rather than follow its own trail back to good pasture, needed some improvement. The cattle grazed nearer to town than usual, since the river had begun to flood. She would have driven them nearer yet, but they could wade in water too deep for her, and when she tried to move them, a small group fled splashing into the water where two of them lost their footing, and were swirled away downstream, lowing miserably.

Ofelia glared at the cattle. They deserved to be drowned, to be eaten by monsters, to be marooned on a sandbar with no grass. She had only tried to help them. They were too much like people, that was their problem. Run from help, run to danger. She pulled her feet out of the muck with the determination not to risk herself again for beasts so ungrateful, and splashed back into the village. The next day, more showers, mixed with hot, steamy sun. She thought of writing her feelings about the storm in the log, but she didn’t want to struggle with the words. Yet she wanted to do something; she felt restless. In the center, the bright scraps in the sewing rooms drew her. No one had bothered to decorate the fabric boxes for travel; she found drawers full of decorative braid, beads, fringes, short runs on the fabricator which had, most likely, not been approved by the supervisors. She couldn’t find what she wanted. She looked in the manual for the fabricator. She wanted rain and wind and lightning, clouds and sunlight above them. Noise. Beauty. Destruction. She pushed buttons and set gauges. The fabricator squealed, as it always did on startup, and emitted a wrinkled strand of silvery-gray, followed by crinkly purple material. Ofelia took it out of the fabricator’s bin, and laid it with the other scraps on the tables. Her fingers shifted this shape and that, this color and that, played texture against texture, and matte against glitter.

By dark she had… something. She wrapped herself in it, unsure. It felt right. Heavy here, light there. Long fringes rippling and tickling her legs. She had sewn metal shapes, rings and arcs, so they rang together. When she looked in the long mirrors, it was no garment she recognized, but it looked the way she had seen it in her mind. She wore it home, in the thick moist dark, and slept in it. That was the only sea-storm of the summer. She added a check of the weather screen to her daily chores. Day by day she tracked two other sea-storms, that came to land hundreds of kilometers away. Her weather returned to the usual late-summer heat and sun, with one or two afternoon rainstorms a week. She cleared the gardens of storm debris, and planned which to use for winter gardens this year. She cut and dried the tomatoes she’d harvested, blanched and froze the beans. Some of the squash would store in the centers cool rooms; some she cut in strips to dry. The peppers, onions, and garlic went on strings, which she hung in the center’s cooler, breezy rooms.