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more I can do now."
"The silva will take over inside a week," said Thomas's second, the
tough-faced, stocky woman, Bruni. She stood by the tower and scrutinized the
lizboo trunks and one foot of a cathedral tree beyond the pipes. One of her
eyelids twitched reflexively. She turned and regarded me curiously, but was
leaving all questions to Thomas.
I accompanied Thomas and four others down to the river. I took one end of a
stretcher, Thomas the other, and we carried Nkwanno's body, the last, from the
dock. Larisa watched as we approached the other bodies lined up in the
quadrangle. "Thank Logos I have no children," she murmured, falling in step
behind.
We all dug four long trench-graves in the hard-packed soil of the quadrangle,
very different from the rich chunky loam in the silva. The spades bit into the
dead and chalky dirt with short singing barks.
Until arriving in Moonrise, I had never had human mortality shoved in my face
with such visceral force, and so often. I had never buried anyone before.
Conflicts with the Jarts in the
Way were altogether swifter and more deadly, leaving few traces...
The sharp intakes of breath and heavy panting of the men and women working
around me, the stamps of defiant individuality on their faces, awoke a hazy,
difficult emotion, horror and pride commingled.
I dug with a will.
One women stopped to wipe away tears. A man joined her, shovel in hand, arm
around her shoulder, and offered her a handkerchief.
We finished a trench intended for thirty of the dead. The first was a small
thin body. The tarp was removed and I saw a woman of perhaps sixty or seventy
years. _Natural_ years, lived
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medical assistance or rejuvenation. She had been shot in the neck and chest by
a projectile weapon. The wounds looked ugly, purple and puffy like old meat.
That was what they had made of her: old meat. The woman's swollen brown and
purple face seemed rudely, disdainfully peaceful.
I looked at my fellow diggers: a strong young man with broad bull-shoulders
and fat cheeks, the auburn-haired strong-bodied woman Bruni, slender
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middle-aged man with a permanently worried expression, a young woman whose
face stayed flushed all the time we dug. Individual. No acquiescence to
artificial beauty; no reconstruction. The bull-shouldered young man put down
his shovel and stared at the dead woman. He seemed reluctant to do what had to
be done.
I bent and closed the old woman's eyes with two fingers. I had once seen that
in an entertainment about times long past, on distant Earth. The touch of her
skin, cold and moist, and the sticky push of her eyelids against sunken
eyeballs made my flesh crawl. The young man nodded gratitude and approval. We
put the woman into the shroud again, making a sling, and lowered her into the
grave. Others arranged more bodies -- young men, old men, two more older
women. They lowered the other bodies into the hole. Working in synch, we
filled in the grave. I observed the faces around me, grim, eyes a little wild;
some dream dying inside.
Sunset. The quadrangle bathed in orange light from a passing cloud, glorious
in the sun.
Dusk loomed when we finished.
Thomas spoke a few words from the Prayer of Common Place over the rows of long
graves.
Others finished their lists and maps of what remained of the village. A female
officer conferred with Thomas about a list of missing children taken from
records in the mayor's office.
Then Thomas took me back to the tower. He pulled a bar of sweetened gum from
his coat pocket, broke it in half, offered half to me, and I took it,
interested in maintaining a friendly connection with this man.
We climbed the tower and looked down on the darkening silva and village, the
empty buildings and houses, the pale tan scars of fresh graves in the
grayish-brown quadrangle, the small greenhouse farm and large tanks, paddles
motionless inside brown sewage, no longer converting waste directly to food. I
could not see the dock, but the far bank of the river was visible. Parasols
and fans folded and furled, withdrawing for the night. A cloud of black dust
shot up from the silva a hundred meters off, drifted. I smelled citrus and
spice.
"Tell me more about why you're here," Thomas said.
"I came here to catch a riverboat. I've spent much of my life the last few
years alone in the silva. I'm not used to violence. I don't know what more I
can do or say."
Thomas rubbed his balding head with a chalky hand. "I said years ago citizens
should be forced to carry papers." He lifted his eyebrows and glared at the
horizon. "'Oh, no, not that,'"
he mimicked. "'This is a place where we can all be free.' We'll take you to
Calcutta. You'll tell what you know to the committee of citizens rank. If
you're one of the Brionists and they left you here by accident -- or left you
here to spy -- I'll personally see you to a full citizen trial in
Athenai."
There was nothing I could say.
I still did not need to sleep. No one wanted to sleep in the buildings. I lay
with the others in one corner of the quadrangle, where no bodies had fallen
and the soil was not stained with blood, under the broad clear sky, tracing
patterns in the stars. The double oxbow was not visible. Now, the sky was
marked by tiny puffs of dim color -- purples and pinks. The shrouds of dead
suns. I felt a dizzying moment of complete disorientation. These stars
probably occupied the same universe, but not necessarily the same galaxy, or
even the same period of time. In the Way's geometry stacks, distance and time
could become as tangled as an infinity of threads tossed into a box.
I was among humans, but that gave little comfort. If I died here, who would
know me well enough to connect the thread of my pneuma to any comprehensible
past?
The burial and service had moved me more profoundly than I thought possible. I
had largely abandoned my spiritual beliefs since joining Way Defense,
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concentrating on a different kind of personal development: devotion to
concept, to large-scale social and not metaphysical issues.
Devotion to fighting off the menace of the Jarts, devils beyond the conception
of any human before the opening of the Way.
Now I faced a much smaller problem, but more personal, and challenging to the
point of almost certain defeat. What I saw in the stars now were the faces of
my mother and father, and all they stood for, suddenly become diseased,
_wrong._
Not many slept that night, however tired. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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