Yarn (25 page)

While I never grumbled about the tools aboard the Pacifica, they had a terrible assemblage of dirty, sticky, bent, and corroded satin pins, needles, thimbles, shears, rippers, and rulers. Worse was the irritable, balsa wood, pedal-powered Singa sewing machine that never really worked. The fabric and notions came from the storeroom, which was filled with shreds and pieces of old costumes. I recognized a few things from her shows on the Europa.

But while the materials were difficult and the tools sad, it was during those eight months-those tiring, endless days and nights-as I first repaired and patched mag-gowns, ribbed corsets, and Jupiter dresses, and then, as I got to know the curves of Vada's body and became familiar and confident with the conventions of woven fabric: the darts, the seams, the finishes, I began to create my own dresses, skirts, corsets, and gowns, that I became not a ticker, a knitter, a stitcher, an apprentice, or student of fashion, but a real tailor.

"It's a little tight here," said Vada as she stood before me in a low-bust bodice and cantilevered symbol skirt.

I quickly re-pinned the edge and allowed for more ease at her waist.

"Yes," she said, smoothing the skirt over her hips. "It's beautiful. I love how it flows. It's like… high clouds… or water in slow motion."

Once our fitting was over, she would put on her robe and settle into her desk to write in her notebook. I never asked but assumed it was a diary.

While she wrote, I sewed by the moonlight that seeped through the oil organza ballonets, or by oil lamp. Some nights, when we passed Bankok, Lumpur, or Malay, and we were dark, I sewed by feel in the pitch-black. Once she finished, I would lay down my needles, and, as Xavier steered the Pacifica over mountains, meandering rivers, and dark valleys of the world's slubs, we explored the landscape of each other's bodies.

One night, a month after I had boarded the Pacifica, Vada and I lay across her bed, the sweat of love cooling my forehead and back, I confessed, "I love being here with you. I love watching you in the things I make for you."

She unfurled a long, low, satisfied growl, exactly the sort of sound one would expect from a panther. "Your creations are celestial."

"I want to do this forever." I sat up and faced her. "You know what I mean?" In the dim of that evening I could just make out her face, but not her expression.

"I do." Her tone was disappointingly cool. I had hoped she might say that all she wanted was to tour the slubs, with me designing her costumes.

Glancing up at the silhouette of the moon just visible through the ballonets, I asked, "Where are we going?"

She laughed softly, sadly. "Eventually… back to the city."

She meant Seattlehama. "Why? You're not going to get another entervator, are you?"

"No."

"This is good. We're happy. I see how the shows make you feel. We can keep doing this. You don't have go back."

She exhaled slowly. "I'm not."

I felt elated for an instant, but then I understood. I flopped back down and stared up at the faint scratch of high clouds in the night sky. "I'm not going back either."

For a minute there was only silence and the occasional vibration of turbulence. A moment later the ship bounced hard, and I heard two seams pop. By that point I could tell from the timbre of the thread where the split had occurred. It was my duty to find and fix tears.

Vada spoke softly. "Were you happy in the city?"

"I'm happy now."

"What about the slubs?"

"No!" I laughed. "I mean, in a way, yes, I was. I loved the corn. I worked at growing it and tending to it. I had friends. But I was only happy because I was so ignorant. But even so, when I looked up at Seattlehama, I just knew there was something else, that there was something I was meant to discover." I touched her arm and found it cool. "I like this. I like you." I waited for a reply and then heard the slow even rhythm of sleep. I lay there, watching the filmy haze of illuminated clouds through the layers of organza. "I love you," I whispered, and kissed her cheek.

The next day we set up our stage south of a city called K'Kom. That part of the world was dominated by the rice clans: Mitsu, Senter, and Wan. Most of slubbers were docile, emaciated, and sad-looking in their rice-cloth tunics, in their reds, blacks, or blues. As we set up the stage and the tent covering, a crowd began to grow and by the time the show was ready to start, there were a thousand instead of our usual several hundred. And unlike most slubbers, these men were boisterous and angry.

"Cover me up," said Vada as I helped her dress for the show in a red beach peignoir. "There's testosterone in the air." When I laughed at her, she frowned. "The Senter clan is strong here, but the Wans are trying to push in. So what do the brandclans reps do?" I shook my head. "They change the hormones in the clothes so the men get aggressive and angry."

I found a white petticoat and helped her slip it over her ruffled polka-dot panties. "Did M-Bunny ever go to war?"

Vada's expression darkened. "Not around Seattlehama. To the south, it's constant war. There, Bunné is ruthless. Originally, the slubs were her labor and manufacturing base, but now it's her lab to culture new war diseases."

I had been fixing her collar, smoothing the fabric around her neck, when I stopped. I had spit the pesticide gum all over my dad's chest desperate to save him. "Why did my dad burn Xi?"

I heard her swallow. "It was fashionable then. He did a lot of fashionable things." Her voice was small and distant. "Toward the end of his life he was brokenhearted. I never really understood."

"He was in love with someone?"

She nodded.

"He was covered with sores when I saw him in the slubs." I laughed at myself sadly. "I thought it was some corn smut or something. I chewed this pesticide gum and spit it all over him. I had no idea what to do!"

She focused her coffee-brown eyes on me. "I'm sorry. I guess he knew the local reps wouldn't know a Xi sore from a corduroy patch."

"M-Bunny paid me a bonus because they thought it was a new disease."

"Oh, that's what happened!" She shook her head. "They wouldn't pay much just for recycling. I'm very sorry, Tane. I didn't realize he gave himself up for incubation. That's terrible!"

"He wanted me to take the bonus money and use it to run away, but I couldn't. I tried, but as soon I would see Seattlehama sinking over the horizon, it felt like I was leaving home."

"If it's any consolation, M-Bunny didn't get anything from his Xi sores."

"Why does M-Bunny pay for diseases?"

"From weapons to medicines. A couple of years ago, Bunné realized that the slubs were perfect for incubating new viruses. There's some pox that she just used in the lower Californias. It was reported that seventy million L. Segus died."

I imagined piles of bodies amid dying soybean plants. It seemed impossible. "Bunné and M-Bunny seem so far away." I closed the button on her right sleeve. "Even so, I feel guilty… like I got away, and all those other M-Bunny men never will."

She frowned. "It's not fair."

Gregg started the show early, but the crowd wasn't interested in him, and soon I couldn't hear the twangs of the electro-static harmonium over the shouts and boos. When Marti appeared in her light-green spread suit they howled with approval, but when they realized all she meant to do was juggle, they grew restless again.

Vada stood at the side of the stage with her arms folded over her chest, her frown etching lines around her mouth. She shook her head. "Tell Xavier to start the motors."

"You haven't even gone on."

She let her arms flop to the sides of her long gown. "This looks bad."

As if on cue, a man holding a pointed bamboo pole rushed onto the stage. He pulled up his tunic and flashed his semi-erect root at Marti. She shoved him back as two more came up. One swung at her. She stumbled avoiding the blow and fell.

Vada, Gregg, and I rushed out. I tried to shove one of the slubbers off the stage, but even though he probably lived on a half cup of cyst rice a day, he was surprisingly strong. He twisted around and knocked me backward. Pushing myself up, I saw Vada lean to one side, supporting herself on just the fingertips of her right hand, and leap horizontally to kick one of them with both feet. The man flew off the stage and into a gang who were climbing up behind him. In a cartoon it would have been accompanied with the crash of scattering bowling pins.

More men rushed the stage. One held a pole, but Gregg ripped it from him and used it to hold the others off while Vada kicked two of them back down. The crowd loved it.

While Marti held back the crowd with a rifle, the rest of us knocked down the stage, bundled it up, and threw it into the storage hatch of the ship. Meanwhile, Xavier started the engines and began adding the lift to the ballonets. In just thirty minutes, the Pacifica was off the ground and Gregg, Vada, and I were climbing the rope ladder to the sky.

By then the crowd had thinned, but those remaining began throwing rocks. One hit Gregg in the face and he lost his grip. I grabbed his jacket, but the fabric strained and started to tear. Vada reached down, grabbed the golden sash around his middle, and hauled him up like he was little more than a laundry bag.

It was then that I heard the pop. One of the slubbers had speared the ship with a bamboo pole. The gases soon pushed the pole from the hole, the ballonets began to soften, and the ship began to sink.

From above Vada said, "We have to set down and repair it."

The crowd below was screaming, stones flew through the air.

"No! Keep going. I'll fix it."

Since the dirigible wasn't fully inflated, I was able to grasp the loose organza in my hands and climb out below the hole like someone hanging from jungle gym bars.

The slash was just five inches long, but if it wasn't stitched up we were going to lose all the half-hydrogen. I had a needle and thread in my pocket, but as I hung there, constantly re-gripping the fabric so I didn't plummet into the mob below, I realized I didn't know how to fix it.

"Tane," shouted Vada, hanging from the lower portal. "You'll fall. Come back!"

"Keep going!"

"We have to set down. Climb back!"

"I've got it!" I still didn't know what to do. Just then the powder engines turned on, and the ship lurched forward. Desperate not to fall off, I jammed my hand into the tear and felt the cold half-hydrogen rush down my sleeve and into my shirt. With my hand inside the ballonet, I grasped the seam allowance with my nails and found I could support myself with just one hand. With the other, I retrieved the threaded needle from my pocket, I sewed my sleeve to the ship, securing myself and sealing the hole in one move. The only problem was that now I had to dangle there as rocks whizzed past my head.

Vada called down from her perch on the ladder. "Hang on! We're landing up ahead!"

"I fixed it!"

She gazed at me proudly, and for that absurd, dangerous, yet perfect instant, I knew she loved me exactly as I loved her.

ANTARCTICA: BIRUDU

I slowed the Chang to a crawl. The last sign I had seen said:
Entering Birudu / Population 48 Million.
And while I could see fields of house-towers in the distance, even cheaper versions of the vertical aluminum cigars that Zoom Langsin lived in, I was in the industrial side of town, where the buildings were squat, windowless, and covered with the varnish of smoke and greed.

Thirty feet ahead of the Chang stood the first man I had seen for miles. He was covered head to foot in a yellow suit with a long visor and articulated black gloves. In one hand he held a long pole with which he was poking at the bottom of a jagged overhang of a building with the measured and bored motions of an hourly worker.

When my door swung open, the biting rot of the outside air seeped into my nose even before I had inhaled. The viscous humidity soon sheened my face, and beneath the soles of my Celine-Audis, the ground was spongy and sticky like risen sourdough.

I stepped to the front of the car and cupped a hand beside my mouth. "Any yarn mills around here?"

The poker man startled. "You're not supposed to be here!" I could just make out the dark triangles of his eyes, nose, and mouth, like charcoal smudges of a sketch hidden in the glare of the plastichrome of his visor. "Get on out!" He turned to the building as a door opened.

From the medical green interior, the silhouettes of two men emerged. Shielding my eyes, I saw that the first wore a short sleeve B-shirt and shorts, while the second was dressed in a HAZMAT suit like Poker. The M-Bunny man's face was covered with a dark crust, like a blackened steak. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips shrank back from mottled black and brown teeth. While his eyes met mine for an instant, I sensed that his will and dreams had withered away to nothing but a sad residue.

I put my right arm to my face and breathed through the filtering material Pheff had hemmed into my sleeve, watching these two men walk to a trailer beyond Poker. Hazmat opened the door and pushed the M-Bunny man inside, shutting it after him. On the door, I could just make out a handwritten sign:
Incubation
. Below it were five interlocking black triangles.

As he returned to the building, Hazmat saw me, stopped, and raised an accusing finger. "Restricted area!"

Meanwhile Poker was idly prodding here and there. "I already told him."

Hazmat shook his head solemnly. "This is a restricted area!" The level of self-righteousness in his voice identified him as a boss. "There's a biological restriction."

My dad had surely encountered someone just like Hazmat. I thought about running at him and leveling him with a heel to the throat, but I turned to my Chang and, while still pressing my suit sleeve to my nose, got inside, quickly lowered the door, and turned the cabin air control to
MAX Purify
.

My hands were shaking and my stomach was acid. I had long avoided thinking about what it had been like for my father after he gave himself up. Even when Vada and I visited the M-Bunny headquarters, my anguish for Rik's regular recycle had diverted my imagination. And much later, when I had the means, I had searched for my father's past, for where he had been and what he had done-not how it had ended. But as I released the brakes, and engaged the forward motors, I was flooded with the vision of my father's last hours. He had been stuffed in some small space, allowed to get sicker so that they could scrape his skin to collect whatever viral or bacterial prize they thought he had. M-Bunny's real product wasn't corn, or the products of its mills and factories, or even more prisoners-it was biological weapons.