The nine conspirators fled from Indiana City along separate paths. On the night chosen for the escape, Marn zigzagged through avenues and alleys, carrying her fear as if it were a dish of mercury. The last lights she passed were the neon signs at the gamepark, where the pedbelts ended and revelers caroused. Every step pushed her deeper into the unlit ruins of factories, over buckled pavement, past abandoned machinery ticking as it released the day’s heat. This was how she had wanted to flee, carrying nothing from her old life except the mask and clothes she wore, without even a flashlight to burden her.
Smell told her when she had reached the abandoned refinery, for the scent of dust gave way to the tang of oil. In the glow from a fading sunset projected onto the dome she could make out soaring chimneys, a snarl of pipes, and giant pumps. The storage tanks echoed back the grit grit of her boots on gravel. She pressed her ear to the fifth tank, but could hear no murmur from inside. What if no one else had come? What if, after months of secret meetings, after gathering supplies for the colony, after vowing to risk their lives together in the wilds—what if the others had been seized by fear?
Her face felt hot behind the mask. Paint flaked away with snicking sounds as she brushed her gloved hands over the tank, searching for the drain valve. When at last she found it she hesitated, a fist clenched on the spoked wheel. After spending every hour of her twenty-two years inside the Enclosure, she could not resist taking one last look back at the city’s dazzle of lights. Nearby, the gamepark glowed orange. Farther away the bio-gas plants and agrifactories flared yellow. And farther still, at the core of the city where her own chamber hummed to itself, the towers blazed toward the dome like mountains afire.
With a shiver, she turned back to the tank, opened the valve, and peered into a tunnel of blackness. “It’s Marn,” she called. “Marn-arn,” the tank echoed back. “Code word harmony,” she added, and the tank echoed, “Harm-arm.”
Then light flared inside, and Jurgen’s shaggy head filled the opening. “It’s about time,” he called gruffly.
She crawled through the valve and emerged, blinking, inside the tank, her gloves and suit smeared with oil. The other eight stood there waiting, muffled in worksuits and masks. Among the voices lifted in greeting, she noticed Hinta’s throaty whisper.
After one last glimpse of the city lights snared in the opening like stars in a telescope, Marn cranked the valve shut. Safe here with the others, surrounded by crates and tools for the settlement, she began trembling. The fear she had balanced so carefully now threatened to spill.
“How’s our chemist?” Jurgen asked. “No problems getting here? No one followed you?”
Marn shook her head. “I was careful.”
“Good. We can go as soon as you’ve checked your crates.”
Chagrined at being the last to arrive, Marn lowered her eyes until the man’s bulky shape withdrew. From a pocket she took the inventory of medicines, catalysts, acids, and chemical reagents they expected to need on the outside but would not be able to synthesize right away. While she checked her supplies, the others began pushing loaded carts into the pipe, headlamps glowing. Jurgen went first, since he had discovered this exit from the city and had marked the spot fourteen kilometers out from the dome where the pipe broke ground. As usual he wore no hood, so his black hair flared out in an unruly mane. Sol went next, walking with an old athlete’s cocky spring, then slouching Rand and gliding Hinta, each conspirator in turn with gait and posture unique as a thumbprint. Marn went last, disguising the tremor in her hands by tightly gripping the handle of her cart.
They slogged along for hours, gasping stale air, taking gulps from an oxygen tank when they grew lightheaded. Their headlamps struck rainbow reflections from the curving walls. Like the refinery and storage tanks, the pipeline had been abandoned when climate chaos forced the banning of fossil fuels. The slap of footsteps and grating of wheels reverberated, kilometer after kilometer, until they reached the spot Jurgen had marked with a phosphorescent red X. He unholstered his laser and began to cut an opening. The others rested, close together in the gloom. Marn could smell them, could smell herself—an animal pungency. She had never been this hot, this wet, this lost in her body.
When the laser finished its cut the section of pipe tilted outward. Cool, damp air rushed in. Daylight blinded her. Tears seeped around her closed lids, yet she wanted to look out, to see the wilds. The dome’s filtered light had given her no hint of this brilliance.
No one spoke, no one moved. Marn squinted through a film of tears at blurred trees, bushes, stones. She had scant language for this outside world, only what she had picked up from reading. It was a muddle of browns and greens. She fixed her gaze on a single plant, its twin leaves canted upward like awnings, a bud sheltered underneath, brown-tipped, potent. If she stared long enough the bud might burst into flower, proving that she really was in the wilds.
Jurgen broke the silence by murmuring, “Great God in the morning.”
Hinta swayed at the lip of the opening. “Just look! Listen! And the smells!”
Marn let out a breath, as if she had come to the surface after swimming underwater. She knew it was April, a month no different from any other inside the Enclosure, but out here it was a season of growth.
With a shout, Jurgen clambered through the opening. The rest followed, dropping gingerly to the ground. Marn stared down at her boots, amazed to find herself actually standing on the planet. She took a few cautious steps, saw the others doing the same, all staggering about as if they were toddlers again just learning to walk. The littered soil yielded beneath her feet and sprang back, resilient. No pavement or floor had ever felt so alive. Her eyes still watered from the raw sunlight. But she could see well enough to tell it was a young forest they had reached, few of the trees thicker than her waist, the ground a tangle of briars and brush.
Jurgen lumbered back to the pipe, pawing the greenery aside and yelling, “Let’s get the stuff unloaded. Let’s find some water and set up camp. Let’s go.”
Rand and Sol were the ones who found the lake, a blue bowl rimmed by trees with arching branches laced in white.
“Dogwood,” said Jurgen, expert on the names of wild things.
By late afternoon, working with hoods thrown back, masks clammy from sweat, they had cleared a space on the shore, spread a layer of polyfilm, and inflated the dome. Long after everyone else had taken shelter inside, Jurgen kept lugging gear from the supply crates. Through the dome’s translucent skin Marn watched his burly shadow pass.
“We’ve got to take this in small doses,” she called out to him. “Leave it for tomorrow.”
Jurgen only grunted as he trudged back for another load.
Beside her, Hinta lay with milky white hair spread in a halo against the somber brown floor. “He told me once that he feels most alive when he’s aching,” she said.
“He’ll kill himself,” Marn said.
“Not Jurgen.” Hinta rolled onto her side, propped her head on a bent arm. A shining rim of skin showed beneath the edge of her mask. “He’ll be around to bury the rest of us.”
“Let’s hope we don’t bury anybody soon,” said Marn.
“Let’s hope.”
Lying on her cushion, Marn stared up at the apex of the dome where the arched sections came together, like a map of travel tubes converging on Indiana City. She imagined the city as a vast printed circuit, its millions of people so many nodes. She would already be fading from the memories of the few who knew her back there, displaced by videos or holos, flushed away by chemmies. “Did you leave anyone behind?” she asked Hinta.
“Everybody I care about is right here,” said Hinta. “And you?”
“I miss a few people.”
“Anybody whose face you ever saw?”
“A couple,” Marn admitted.
“Did you just look, or did you touch?”
Marn flushed. Her tongue felt prickly. Before she could answer, Hinta quickly added, “I’m sorry. That’s a rude question.”
They lay quietly on their cushions, Marn’s heart pounding. She was ashamed to admit she had never touched anyone, skin to skin, unless perhaps in infancy, back before memory.
Jurgen was the last to retreat inside the dome, well after nightfall. He took his place among the others, who lay in their sleeping bags, their bodies arrayed like spokes with feet pointing toward the center of the dome. Because his cushion was next to hers, Marn turned away from him before removing her work mask. She paused, the night mask in her hand, feeling the breath-moistened air on her face. Then she covered herself and lay down, became a spoke in the wheel of bodies.
Tired but not yet drowsy, she listened to the others murmur and wheeze. She had never shared a sleeping space with anyone before, and at first their snorting and rustling disturbed her. Then as they drifted deeper, their breathing calmed and their limbs grew still. No electronic hum, no whirr of pedbelts, no blare of loudspeakers, no human clatter. Marn felt she could almost gather it in her hands, this downy silence. She imagined the wheel of bodies as a seed encased in the dome, the dome encircled by forest, the forest by continent and oceans, and so on outward, beyond Earth and solar system and Milky Way, circle beyond circle.
For the next week Marn would not leave the dome. She mixed a starting brew for the bio-digester, and ran tests on samples of water and soil the others brought in. But she would not remove her gloves or throw back her hood or venture outside. She took showers in distilled water. At night, she dosed herself with histaphones and immunies. Groggy from the drugs, she slept behind a screen, her ears plugged against the sound of other sleepers, dreaming of her own solitary chamber back in the city.
She woke in the mornings with the unsettling taste of the wilds in her mouth.
Hinta left her alone. But Jurgen tried to soothe her in his bearish, rumbling way. “It’s wildershock, same as health patrollers and sea miners get. We’ve all suffered from it.”
“I’m okay,” Marn insisted. “I run the lab, right? Isn’t that enough?”
Then on the seventh day, at sunset, she forced herself to go out. The countryside was luminous. For a long time she lingered near the dome, fighting her dread. Maybe she should throw off her clothes and dive into the lake, drown her fear by yielding completely. The thought made her shudder.
She turned her back on the lake. But the forest was equally troubling, with its drool of vines, maze of branches, explosion of leaves. Only the brand-new works of the settlement reassured her. Overhead, solar panels swiveled to catch the last rays of sunlight. Wind turbines spun, the whir of their blades barely audible against the rustle of leaves. Everywhere she looked, blueprints were coming to life: hydroponic tanks, methane generator, smaller domes for work and meditation clustered around the large central dome like a ring of bubbles, the whole settlement stitched together by graveled pathways.
Marn chose the widest path and followed it with head bent down, so as not to see the anarchic green that pressed in from all sides. When at last she looked up, she found herself at the pipeline. The slab that Jurgen had cut still lay in the weeds, its unpainted inner surface dull with rust. She scuffed at the redness with her boot. Nothing rusted inside Indiana City.
She pressed her hooded ear against the sun-warmed pipe, listening, unsure what she wanted to hear. The purr of patrol shuttles coming after them? The ticking gears of the city? The hum of her own abandoned chamber? But she heard nothing. Nobody would come for them, so long as they stayed outside, never broke the seal around the city. You could escape into wildness, if you were clever enough, but you could not return, lest you poison the Enclosure.
“Thinking about going back?”
Startled by the voice, Marn jerked away from the pipe. Hinta stood on the path, her mask askew, gloves crusty with dirt.
“I was just listening,” Marn said.
“It’s tempting, isn’t it, to go back inside where everything is measured and predictable?”
“Yes,” Marn admitted.
“It’s scary out here.” Freed of the hood, Hinta’s pale hair sprang into a curly ruff. “But isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it make you feel like you’ve finally come awake?”
Studying her, Marn felt that Hinta might be the first person she could touch, a woman like herself, less alien, less coarse and brutish than a man. The flounce of her hair seemed as uncanny as the dusk-lit trees.
Later that night, when all nine sat in the dome planning the next day’s work, Marn spoke for the first time of her dread. The others nodded, admitting their own fears, even Jurgen.
“I still have to squint every time I go out through that hatch,” he said, “so I see only a bit of the wilds at a time. We’ve got to learn everything all over again. It’s hard work. But we can do it. We belong out here.”
A murmur of agreement ran around the circle.
“We’ve got to get back in touch with Earth,” Jurgen said. “Back in touch with our bodies.” A surge of emotion jolted his big frame, and he yanked the mask from his face.
Marn was too dazed at first to realize what was happening. Then Hinta removed her mask, revealing a pale, delicate face, and blue eyes as quick and bright as Marn had guessed they would be. A moment later Sol stripped his mask away, then Norba and Jolon, and so on around the circle until Marn found herself pushing aside the molded husk and gaping at the others with naked face. In her entire life, she had reached this stage of intimacy with only seven people, and only after lengthy rituals of preparation. Now suddenly here were eight more. Amid the confusion of lips and cheeks and gleaming eyes, she felt at last that she was truly outside, in exile from all she had known.
That night, a purring sound woke her, a soft drumming on the roof of the dome, and after a moment of unease she smiled. Her first rain.
Gradually, Marn began to trust the wind and rain, the dirt and sky, and the expressions on bare faces. Sometimes as she worked outdoors she would find herself in a drowse, saturated with sun, her mind gone out.
One afternoon, she helped Jurgen search the nearby hills for a spring to supply earth-filtered water for the fish tanks. Eventually they traced a brook to its source at the head of a ravine, where someone long ago had walled in a pool with stones. The walls had slumped, and from the jumble of stones, velvety with moss, water seeped downhill in glistening threads. The pool was fringed by blue flowers, their clusters of trumpet-shaped blossoms bobbing from tall stems. Jurgen had a way of stooping over any new plant, screwing up his black eyes in an effort of memory, and then declaring its name.
“Virginia bluebells,” he announced. “Just like the pictures, only they’re alive. Amazing.”
Marn felt her own face mirroring his pleasure. She had not gone without a mask long enough to gain control of her features, so emotions swirled across her face as wind stirred the surface of the lake. “It seems a shame to disturb the stones,” she said. “The flowers are so pretty.”
“Call them bluebells,” Jurgen insisted. “We need to recover the old names.”
“Yes, bluebells.”
A grin cracked his black beard. Turning to her, his arms spreading as if to enwrap her, he bellowed, “And look at that!”
She flinched back, but he lumbered past her, arms swung wide, and scrambled up the slope to the base of an immense tree. The gray bark of the trunk had flaked away in fist-size chips to reveal a creamy bark underneath, as if the tree were shedding. Higher up, where the branches canopied against the sky, the smooth under-bark showed through like the skin of something newborn.
“It’s a sycamore,” Jurgen cried, almost singing the word. He slammed his chest against the rough trunk and hugged the tree.
“You look silly,” Marn said.
“Silly?” he roared. “How could anybody come across a great tree like this and not wrap arms around it? A sycamore! I never thought I’d see one.” He leaned back and gazed up the trunk. “The old-timers used the wood for water troughs and wagon wheels and butcher blocks.”
Marn turned away in disgust, thinking of knives, meat, blood. Her stomach churned. That was the way with Jurgen. One minute he made her feel easy in the wilds, the next minute he shocked her.
Noting her disgust, he growled, “City girl.”
“I’m trying. It’s a lot to get used to.”
His mouth quirked into what she took as a smile, although she could not be sure. Only his teeth showed through the bristling fur. “Sorry. I get impatient. Let’s work.”
They leaned their packs against the scabby trunk of the sycamore. Scrabbling down the bank, avoiding the frail blue flowers, Jurgen was the first to reach the spring. He grabbed a stone, then another and another, heaving them to the side. Marn slid after him, wary of his flailing elbows. As he hefted the next rock, there was a blur of movement, like a rope snapping and recoiling, and he cried out.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’ll be damned. A snake.” He stared at his arm. “I’ve just been snakebit.”
“A snake? But they’re extinct.”
He gave a harsh bark of laughter. “This one didn’t get the message.”
He loosened his cuff and folded back the sleeve. Marn forced herself to look at his bare forearm, which bristled with the same coarse black hair that covered his jaw and skull. The muscles were thick and netted with veins. Near the elbow were twin rows of puncture-marks, like pin-pricks, leading up to a pair of larger purplish holes, oozing blood.
She pressed a hand over her mouth. Words dried on her tongue.
“I’m glad to learn we didn’t kill off all the snakes,” Jurgen said, “but I’d be happier if this one wasn’t poisonous.”
“How do you know it’s poisonous?”
“See those two big holes? Those are fang marks, where the venom is injected. Question is, what species?” He rehearsed the possibilities as he labored up the slope. “Too far north for cottonmouths. A rattler would have made a ruckus. Likely a copperhead.” He suddenly turned, and Marn, hurrying after, bumped into him, then immediately pulled back. “Could you tell,” he asked, “was it brownish, with darker bands, or creamy with copper bands?”
Marn trembled. “All I saw was like a rope lashing out. I didn’t notice color.”
“Well, open your eyes.” His gaze, dark and rough as the stones he had been heaving, glared at her, then swung away. He continued on up to the sycamore, where he slumped against the piebald trunk. His outstretched legs in their muddy coveralls looked like two more knotty tree roots. He tilted the arm for inspection.
Marn approached cautiously, afraid of Jurgen, of the snake, of the repulsive wound. “Shouldn’t we go back?”
Again he laughed harshly, his chin thrust up by pain. “If that bastard could survive our poisons, I can survive his.”
“We need the medicine kit.”
“I’ll be okay as soon as I rest a minute.” He tilted his head back against the trunk and loosed a full-throated bellow.
Was this how the poison worked? Marn wondered. She hovered uncertainly before him, feeling too small to budge him unless he cooperated. “Come on, Jurgen. We’ve got to go back.”
“If there’s snakes, what else might have survived?” His eyes, already squinting from pain, squeezed tighter in his effort to recall names. “Fox. Deer. Turtles. Eagles. Salamanders. What else? Bears. Beavers. Owls. Why not coyotes? Maybe even cougars.”
The terror Marn had felt when she first peered out through the hole in the pipeline now swept back over her. It was madness to have left Indiana City. Stifling or not, life back there was at least safe. Nothing could lash out at you, leap on you, bite you. Her skin crawled. “Jurgen,” she said as calmly as she could, “get up. We’re going back to camp.”
“Right,” he grunted. But instead of moving, he gazed at his wounded arm. The flesh was turning purple, the skin from elbow to wrist was swelling. “Imagine—snakebite!”
“Jurgen,” she pleaded.
“Just get my pins under me.” His legs jerked, but failed to lift him. “Dizzy.”
His weakness frightened her now, as his strength had frightened her before. “Should I go for help?”
Jurgen shook his head. “No. I can walk. Give me a hand.” He raised his good arm.
Without letting herself think, Marn grabbed his thick hand with both of hers, braced her feet against a root, and tugged with all her might. Slowly he rose to his feet. Once upright, he staggered a few steps. “Can’t see. Fool legs won’t work.”
Again without thinking, Marn slipped an arm around his waist and eased her shoulder against his side, bracing him. They lurched ahead. He was massive and his weight seemed to grow with every step. But she would not let go, not even when he reeled and his beard rasped her forehead. She could feel his panting against her ribs, and she found herself panting in sympathy.
By the time they stumbled into the dome she was too weary to fret about their twined bodies. But the startled expressions with which Hinta and Sol greeted them brought back her confusion.
“A snake bit him,” Marn explained, short of breath.
“A what?” demanded Sol, shrinking back. Even Hinta raised her gloves, palms out, as if to shove them away.
“Help me lay him down.”
“Are we there?” Jurgen’s voice rose brokenly. The good fist rubbed his eyes. “Can’t see a thing.”
That snapped Hinta and Sol out of their daze. Together with Marn they lowered him to his cushion. The swollen arm, mottled scarlet and purple, made Marn nauseous. She pushed her feelings aside and bent over him, covering him with his sleeping bag. Sol ran to call the others, while Hinta powered up the medicine console.
Marn was trying to cut Jurgen’s sleeve with scissors, to ease the swelling, but the arm kept jerking. “Jurgen,” she spoke close to his ear, “you’re going to be all right. But we’ve got to touch you. You’ll forgive that?”
His answer was mumbled. “Sure, sure. Go ahead.”
A point of fear glinted from his black eyes. His shivering made the cushion tremble. Marn finished cutting the sleeve, then drew the cover to his chin, leaving only the puffy arm exposed. “Hurry,” she whispered to Hinta. “He’s in shock.”
“Snakebite?” Hinta called. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Copperhead. Code it in, see if there’s an antidote.”
Hinta slipped off her gloves and typed the implausible message on the console. As Marn watched the lithe fingers dance on the keys, desire uncoiled in her. She yearned to make her first contact with this brisk woman, so easy in her body. But instead here was Jurgen stretched out beside her, his body cumbersome and rough.
“It says lower the arm,” Hinta read from the screen, “bind it above the elbow, slit the skin at the fang marks, suck the venom out, administer antivenin.”
“Can we make that?” Marn asked.
Hinta tapped the keys, paused, shook her head, the milky hair swirling. “Idiot machine synthesizes antidotes for every toxin we ever invented. But for natural poisons—nothing.”
Jurgen broke into delirious babbling. “Snake, by God. Thought they were all dead. Wolves. Bears. Ghost bite.”
“Easy,” Marn whispered. It seemed callous to touch him through clumsy gloves, so she drew them off and pressed her bare hand to his cheek. The shudder of that contact ran through her body. But she had no time to savor it.
Hinta passed her the antiseptic swab and scalpel. Worry swept aside all of Marn’s inhibitions, made her scrub and then slice the skin, exposing red flesh. Meat, the same as any animal. “Now the syringe.”
“I’m looking for it.”
Marn waited. Jurgen trembled under her hands. “Hurry.”
Hinta rummaged in the medical chest with angry clacking noises. “It’s not here. Maybe somebody took it for collecting samples.”
Marn let her body think for her. “Quick, check if the venom is a stomach poison.”
“Why do you—”
Clicking of keys. “No,” said Hinta, “it’s a blood poison.”
Marn looked down at Jurgen. Only the whites of his eyes were visible. His mouth was a wheezing hole in the beard. The skin around the wound seemed ready to split. The fang marks oozed.
“You’re not going—” said Hinta in a panic.
Marn waved her away. It was like bending steel to force her mouth down to the festering wound. Her lips met his hot skin. She sucked, and the first trickle of fluid on her tongue made her gag. She reared back and spat violently into a bowl. Then she bent once more to the wound.
By then the others were crowding into the dome, simmering with questions, carrying with them the smells of wood and dirt. Marn heard the word snake hissed repeatedly, as if it were an incantation. She kept sucking, gagging and spitting, until they were shocked into silence, kept sucking until nothing more would come, then she leaned back, mouth sticky, an acrid taste on her tongue. She glared at the ring of faces. “What are you staring at? You’d rather he die?”
They drew back from her, as from a sparking wire. Marn stayed by Jurgen, her hand on the black spittle-soaked fur of his jaw. She felt a connection with this man, as if in pressing her lips to him a circuit had been closed and power had surged between them.
“We don’t have the antidote,” Hinta explained to the others.
Their whispers took up again the hiss of snake, snake. It was as though, in felling Jurgen, a legendary beast had struck at them all. What did any of them know about the wilds? School had taught them little, merely filled them with dread of the outside. Videos and holos showed only deserts, sulphurous volcanos, blank oceans, and miles of blighted emptiness. You could learn about this forested and rivered world only by hearsay, through the old folks, or through tedious hours in the archives.
Marn stroked Jurgen’s hair, which felt as springy and resilient as the soil in the forest. His mouth sagged open, breathing hoarsely. His naked arm, bloated and discolored, lay at his side.
“The question is,” Hinta was saying, “do we take him back inside or not?”
“And give it all up?” The acid-scars on Jolon’s cheeks reddened with indignation.
“No, absolutely not,” said Coyt.
Voices jumbled together too quickly for Marn to sort them out. The sensations from her hands commanded all her attention—the wiry mat of his beard, so strange, and the stuttering pulse in the bend of his elbow. Could a heart pump so fast, through so huge a body? He bulked on his cushion like a fallen tree.
When Marn could separate voices again, Rand was saying, “It would take a pair of us to haul him back through the pipe. Or we might locate a health patroller.”
“And the Overseers would be here in half an hour with cages and chemmies,” Jolon pointed out. The ruddy scars on her cheeks, the tension in her body, the balled fist on either knee proclaimed that she had no intention of going back.
Heads nodded in agreement. Marn knew they were right. Any contact with Indiana City would end the experiment and land them in quarantine, most likely for the rest of their lives. But she wanted the choice made clear: “And if he dies?”
No one answered. Except for the strain in their faces, they might have been meditating, or drugged. Marn recalled the vows she had taken with them back in that echoing oil tank—to live outside for a year, a cycle of seasons, before voting to stay or return. And if they returned, to do so in secret. She remembered how Jurgen had always been the first to shove aside every obstacle. Jurgen, with sawdust on his beard, proclaiming to all the astounding properties of wood. Jurgen, stinking with sweat, laughing when the others wrinkled their noses at him. Jurgen, ripping away his mask, spreading his hands on the Earth.
Marn spoke deliberately. “It’s not worth his dying. Nothing’s worth it.”
Sol pinched his upper lip. “We knew there’d be accidents.”
“That’s why there are nine of us,” Coyt added. “Redundancy.”
Marn could not connect their words to this body panting beneath her hand. She kept hearing him cry out in pain, kept seeing those mitts claw at his inflamed eyes. Her own vision began to blur. The others’ faces merged, until they all seemed like clones of the same hostile person. For the first time in days she longed for her mask, to hide herself.
Then she heard Hinta’s voice, and recognized once again the silky hair, the high cheek-bones: “I don’t think he’d want us to go back inside.”
Her blue eyes, which usually made Marn think of sky, now made her think of ice. “Look,” said Marn, “this isn’t a broken machine. It’s Jurgen, don’t you see?”
“We know, Marn, we know,” Hinta soothed. “We’re not forgetting him. He’s why I’m here, and why I’m going to stay.”
“I say we vote,” Jolon insisted.
“Vote, vote,” cried the others.
“All right, then,” said Hinta. “Do we take him inside?”
Like the others, Marn curled one hand in her lap, thinking furiously. Thrust one finger up—or a closed fist? That was the computer’s binary choice, yes or no, too stark for human questions. How could she let him die, the first person she had ever touched? And yet this was why they had come outside, to get back in touch. Return to Indiana City would be death of another kind.
“Time,” Hinta called.
As Marn lifted her arm, the fist closed of itself, squeezed tight as if to keep hold on something. Around the circle were eight balled fists, eight refusals to go back.
Marn closed her eyes. Beneath her fingers Jurgen’s hectic pulse raced on and on, against all reason.
The others padded away to the hatch, where their boots and tools waited for them, a few pausing beside Marn on their way, glancing at Jurgen, whispering in sober tones. If the largest one of us could fall so quickly, to a beast we thought was extinct, what might happen to the rest of us? That is what Marn heard in their whispers, what she read in their taut faces as they withdrew again to the day’s chores.
Only Hinta stayed behind. Her eyes, no longer ice, had become sky again, a softer blue. As she lowered herself beside Marn, she sighed. Their shoulders brushed. Neither drew back. “So we wait,” Hinta said.
“We wait,” said Marn.
“He might live. Just to spite the city. Show them he can survive outdoors, do without their fancy medicines.”
Marn wanted to bury her face in that springy hair. But her lips were still gummy with Jurgen’s blood. Beneath her hand his pulse shredded away the minutes.
After a while Hinta stirred. “Come on, you need a break from this.” Rising with a sensuous unfolding of her legs, she went to the dome’s entrance and whistled.
Moments later, Sol ambled in. “News?” he asked.
“No,” said Hinta. “He’s the same. Would you sit with him, keep him warm, spoon him some cardio if he comes to?”
Marn caught the small word—if.
“Sure,” Sol replied. “You going out?”
Hinta drew on her gloves, tucked her hair into the collar of her worksuit. “Marn and I want to go clear that spring.”
“No,” Marn insisted. “The spring can wait.”
“He’s unconscious. He doesn’t know you’re here.”
“But I can’t just leave him.”
“Your staying won’t do him any good. You’ll only make yourself sick. And we need you, we need everyone.” Hinta waited by the airlock holding a shovel, one hip thrust out in a challenge Marn could not decipher.
“Go on,” Sol urged. “We’ll come get you if there’s any change.”
Marn knelt beside Jurgen, hesitating. Her wrist tingled from his breath. The pulse seemed to be growing stronger. A crescent of black iris showed under each eyelid. What if he should wake, now, and find her fingers on his throat, her hair brushing his face?
Confused, she lifted her hand from the warm skin, stood up, backed away, and followed Hinta outdoors.
The rock-strewn spring, which had seemed a kilometer distant this morning when she was helping Jurgen back to the dome, was only a few minutes’ walk away.
“Look at the lovely blue flowers,” Hinta said.
“Bluebells,” Marn told her. “And that’s a sycamore,” she added, pointing to the gigantic piebald tree.
“Such odd names. Sounds like Jurgen’s teaching.”
“Yes.” Marn took the shovel from Hinta, saying, “In case mister snake is still around.” Then she scooted down the bank amid the nodding blossoms, her boots gouging the mud.
And mister snake was still around, slashing at the shovel as soon as Marn disturbed its lair. There was the same blur of movement, like an end-knotted rope snapping, and the click of teeth against metal. The two women leapt back, and the snake withdrew. Furious, Marn realized now why she had come. She pried the stones apart with the shovel, tumbled a few, and then out the creature slithered, gliding with sinuous ease. Its wedge-shaped head was the color of copper, and its length was ringed by coppery bands. It might have been a limb off the sycamore, cast down and set moving. Nothing she had ever seen rivaled it for grace. She watched, fascinated, as a forked tongue licked out between the fangs, tasting the air.
Only when the snake lowered its head and began writhing away did she remember Jurgen lying unconscious. Hatred ran like acid in her veins. Hefting the shovel she advanced on the snake, tightening every muscle to crush it. But even before she heard Hinta crying, “No, no, let it be!” she was easing the handle onto her shoulder. The hatred passed, dissolved away by an emotion she could not name, as she watched the creature until it glided out of sight into weeds.
“He belongs here,” Hinta said. “This is his place.”
Marn nodded, half mesmerized. Now that it had vanished, the snake seemed almost legendary again, too beautiful and supple and quick to be real. She tugged the gloves away to wipe her eyes.
Hinta removed her own gloves. Without a word, she took Marn’s hand.
That night, when Jurgen muttered in his sleep, “Marn? Where’s Marn?” she rolled over, pulled the sleeping bag up to his throat, rested a hand on his forehead. No fever. She touched his wrist, and was reassured by the slow, steady pulse.
Relieved, she crept from the dome and into the bewildering night. The darkness buzzed with clicks and cries. From the woods came a hooting sound that might have been an owl. Was that possible? Scraps of moonlight rocked on the lake. In the water there might be more snakes, or other beasts for which she had no names, but she would go in anyway. Shrugging free of her clothes, she waded in with muscles tensed, breath held, then splashed forward as she would in a pool. But this was no sanitized water; this was whatever the lake gathered from land and sky.
Marn lay on her back and floated. The air was rank with the smell of weeds and mud. The water licked the salt from her skin, washed away the dirt, but it could not scour away the taste of Jurgen’s blood or the feel of Hinta’s fingers.
The night was the coolest she had ever known, as the day had been the hottest. This was what it meant to live in weather, shivering and sweating by turns.
Lit from inside, the dome appeared like a faceted globe. Marn could see the dim shapes of the others preparing for sleep. Someone would be checking on Jurgen, giving him water, making him comfortable. I should be doing it, Marn thought. But she could not yet look into his stone-dark eyes without confusion.
Afloat, she let her thoughts spread out on the water and dissolve.
Sometime later a voice called her name, and she opened her eyes on darkness spangled with stars.
“Marn! Are you all right?” came the voice. It was Hinta, her lean silhouette on the bank.
“I’m fine,” Marn answered. The water sluiced along her ribs, her thighs, as she swam toward shore.
“I saw you go out,” Hinta said. “I started to worry.”
“Time seemed—” Marn began. But she could not tell what had become of time, or of her fear. She stood up in the shallows, and could see her nakedness register in Hinta’s startled gaze.
“Here’s a towel,” Hinta offered.
Marn’s feet sank into the muck without moving. “I’m not ready to come out yet.”
“Isn’t the water cold?”
“Come see.”
For a few seconds, Hinta did not move, a slender column of darkness. Then she wriggled free of her clothes and eased into the shallows beside Marn. “Brrr,” she said. “It is cold.”
“Swim out with me,” Marn answered, “and you’ll soon warm up.” Touching the other woman to keep contact in the dark, Marn led her away from shore.