4
The Gift
As the Laurel-wreathed boxes come down to Gamma, I think about
how clever it really is. They won’t let us win the Laurel. They don’t
care that the math doesn’t work. They don’t care that the young
scream in protest and the old moan their same tired wisdoms. This
is just a demonstration of their power. It is their power. They decide
the winner. A game of merit won by birth. It keeps the hierarchy in
place. It keeps us striving, but never conspiring.
Yet despite the disappointment, some part of us doesn’t blame the
Society. We blame Gamma, who receives the gifts. A man’s only got
so much hate, I suppose. And when he sees his children’s ribs
through their shirts while his neighbors line their bellies with meat
stews and sugared tarts, it’s hard for him to hate anyone but them.
You think they’d share. They don’t.
My uncle shrugs at me and others are red and mad. Loran looks
like he might attack the Tinpots or the Gammas. But Eo doesn’t let
me boil in it. She doesn’t let my knuckles turn white as I clench my
sts in fury. She knows the temper I have inside me better even
than my own mother, and she knows how to drain the rage before it
rises. My mother smiles softly as she watches Eo take me by the
arm. How she loves my wife.
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“Dance with me,” Eo whispers. She shouts for the zithers to get
going and the drums to get rolling. No doubt she’s pissin’ re. She
hates the Society more than I do. But this is why I love my wife.
Soon the fast zither music swells and the old men slap their hands
on tables. The layered skirts y. Feet tap and shue. And I grasp
my wife as the clans ow in dance throughout the square to join us.
We sweat and we laugh and try to forget the anger. We grew
together, and now are grown. In her eyes, I see my heart. In her
breath, I hear my soul. She is my land. She is my kin. My love.
She pulls me away with laughter. We wend our way through the
crowd to be alone. Yet she does not stop when we are free. She
guides me along metal walkways and low, dark ceilings to the old
tunnels, to the Webbery, where the women toil. It is between shifts.
“Where are we going exactly?” I ask.
“If you remember, I have gifts for you. And if you apologize for
your own gift going at, I’ll smack you in the gob.”
Seeing a bloody-red haemanthus bulb peaking out from the wall, I
snatch it up and hand it to her. “My gift,” I said. “I did intend to
surprise you.”
She giggles. “Well then. This inner half is mine. This outer half is
yours. No! Don’t pull at it. I’m keeping your half.” I smell the
haemanthus in her hand. It stinks like rust and Mother’s meager
stews.
Inside the Webbery, thigh-thick spiderworms of brown and black
fur, with long skeletal legs, knit silk around us. They crawl along the
girders, thin legs disproportionate to their corpulent abdomens. Eo
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leads me into the Webbery’s highest level. The old metal girders are
laced with silk. I shiver in looking at the creatures above and below;
pitvipers I understand, spiderworms I do not. The Society’s Carvers
made the creatures. Laughing, Eo guides me to a wall and pulls back
a thick curtain of webbing, revealing a rusted metal duct.
“Ventilation,” she says. “Mortar on the walls gave way to reveal it
about a week ago. An old tube too.”
“Eo, they’ll lash us if they nd us. We’re not allowed …”
“I’m not going to let them ruin this gift too.” She kisses me on the
nose. “Come on, Helldiver. There’s not even a molten drill in this
tunnel.”
I follow her through a long series of turns in the small shaft till we
exit out a grate into a world of inhuman sounds. A buzz murmurs in
the darkness. She takes my hand. It’s the only familiar thing.
“What is that?” I ask of the sound.
“Animals,” she says, and leads me into the strange night.
Something soft is beneath my feet. I nervously let her pull me
forward. “Grass. Trees. Darrow, trees. We’re in a forest.”
The scent of owers. Then lights in the darkness. Flickering
animals with green abdomens utter through the black. Great bugs
with iridescent wings rising from the shadows. They pulse with
color and life. My breath catches and Eo laughs as a buttery passes
so close I can touch it.
They’re in our songs, all these things, but we’ve only ever seen
them on the HC. Their colors are unlike any I could believe. My eyes
have seen nothing but soil, the are of the drill, Reds, and the gray
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of concrete and metal. The HC has been the window through which
I’ve seen color. But this is a dierent spectacle.
The colors of the oating animals scald my eyes. I shiver and
laugh and reach out and touch the creatures oating before me in
the darkness. I cup them and look up at the room’s clear ceiling. It is
a transparent bubble that peers at the sky.
Sky. Once it was just a word.
I cannot see Mars’s face, but I can see its view. Stars glow soft and
graceful in the slick black sky, like the lights that dangle above our
township. Eo looks as though she could join them. Her face is aglow
as she watches me, laughing as I fall to my knees and suck in the
scent of the grass. It is a strange smell, sweet and nostalgic, though I
have no memories of grass. As the animals buzz near in the brush, in
the trees, I pull her down, I kiss her with my eyes open for the rst
time. The trees and their leaves sway gently from the air that comes
through the vents. And I drink the sounds, the smells, the sight as
my wife and I make love in a bed of grass beneath a roof of stars.
“That is Andromeda Galaxy,” she tells me later as we lie on our
backs. The animals make chirping noises in the darkness. The sky
above me is a frightening thing. If I stare too intently, I forget
gravity’s pull and feel as though I am going to fall into it. Shivers
trickle down my spine. I am a creature of nooks and tunnels and
shafts. The mine is my home, and part of me wants to run to safety,
run from this alien room of living things and vast spaces.
Eo rolls to look at me and traces the steam scars that run like
rivers down my chest. Further down she’d nd scars from the
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pitviper along my belly. “Mum used to tell me stories of
Andromeda. She’d draw with inks given to her by that Tinpot,
Bridge. He always liked her, you know.”
As we lie together, she takes a deep breath and I know she has
planned something, saved something to talk about in this moment.
This place is leverage.
“You won the Laurel, we all know,” she says to me.
“You needn’t coddle me. I’m not angry any longer. It doesn’t
matter,” I say. “After seeing this, none of that matters.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks sharply. “It matters more
than ever. You won the Laurel, but they didn’t let you keep it.”
“It doesn’t matter. This place …”
“This place exists, but they don’t let us come here, Darrow. The
Grays must use it for themselves. They don’t share.”
“Why should they?” I ask, confused.
“Because we made it. Because it’s ours!”
“Is it?” The thought is foreign. All I possess is my family and
myself. Everything else is the Society’s. We didn’t spend the money
to send the pioneers here. Without them, we’d be on the dying Earth
like the rest of humanity.
“Darrow! Are you so Red that you don’t see what they’ve done to
us?”
“Watch your tone,” I say tightly.
Her jaw exes. “I’m sorry. It’s just … we are in chains, Darrow.
We are not colonists. Well, sure we are. But it’s more on the spot to
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call us slaves. We beg for food. Beg for Laurels like dogs begging for
scraps from the master’s table.”
“You may be a slave,” I say very pointedly. “But I am not. I don’t
beg. I earn. I am a Helldiver. I was born to sacrice, to make Mars
ready for man. There’s a nobility to obedience.…”
She throws up her hands. “A talking puppet, are you? Spitting out
their bloodydamn lines. Your father had the right of it. He might not
have been perfect, but he had the right of it.” She grabs a clump of
grass and tears it out of the ground. It seems like some sort of
sacrilege.
“We have claim over this land, Darrow. Our sweat and blood
watered this soil. Yet it belongs to the Golds, to the Society. How
long has it been this way? A hundred, a hundred and fty years of
pioneers mining and dying? Our blood and their orders. We prepare
this land for Colors that have never shed sweat for us, Colors that sit
in comfort on their thrones on distant Earth, Colors that have never
been to Mars. Is that something to live for? I’ll say it again, your
father had the right of it.”
I shake my head at her. “Eo, my father died before he was even
twenty-ve because he had the right of it.”
“Your father was weak,” she mutters.
“What the bloodydamn is that supposed to mean?” Blood rises
into my face.
“It means he had too much restraint. It means your father had the
right dream but died because he would not ght to make it real,”
she says sharply.
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“He had a family to protect!”
“He was still weaker than you.”
“Careful,” I hiss.
“Careful? This from Darrow, the mad Helldiver of Lykos?” She
laughs patronizingly. “Your father was born careful, obedient. But
were you? I didn’t think so when I married you. The others say you
are like a machine, because they think you know no fear. They’re
blind. They don’t see how fear binds you.”
She traces the haemanthus blossom along my collarbone in a
sudden show of tenderness. She is a creature of moods. The ower is
the same color as the wedding band on her nger.
I roll on an elbow to face her. “Spit it out. What do you want?”
“Do you know why I love you, Helldiver?” she asks.
“Because of my sense of humor.”
She laughs dryly. “Because you thought you could win the Laurel.
Kieran told me how you burned yourself today.”
I sigh. “The rat. Always jabbering. Thought that’s what younger
brothers were supposed to do, not elders.”
“Kieran was frightened, Darrow. Not for you, like you might be
thinking. He was frightened of you, because he can’t do what you
did. Boy wouldn’t even think it.”
She always talks circles around me. I hate the abstracts she lives
for.
“So you love me because you believe that I think there are things
worth the risk?” I puzzle out. “Or because I’m ambitious?”
“Because you’ve a brain,” she teases.
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She makes me ask it again. “What do you want me to do, Eo?”
“Act. I want you to use your gifts for your father’s dream. You see
how people watch you, take their cues from you. I want you to
think owning this land, our land, is worth the risk.”
“How much a risk?”
“Your life. My life.”
I sco. “You’re that eager to get rid of me?”
“Speak and they will listen,” she urges. “It is that bloody simple.
All ears yearn for a voice to lead them through darkness.”
“Grand, so I’ll hang with a troop. I am my father’s son.”
“You won’t hang.”
I laugh too harshly. “So certain a wife I have. I’ll hang.”
“You’re not meant to be a martyr.” Sighing, she lies back in
disappointment. “You wouldn’t see the point to it.”
“Oh? Well then, tell me, Eo. What is the point to dying? I’m only
a martyr’s son. So tell me what that man accomplished by robbing
me of a father. Tell me what good comes of all that bloodydamn
sadness. Tell me why it’s better I learned to dance from my uncle
than my father.” I go on. “Did his death put food on your table? Did
it make any of our lives any better? Dying for a cause doesn’t do a
bloodydamn thing. It just robbed us of his laughter.” I feel the tears
burning my eyes. “It just stole away a father and a husband. So
what if life isn’t fair? If we have family, that is all that should
matter.”
She licks her lips and takes her time in replying.
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“Death isn’t empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without
freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living enchained by fear, fear of loss,
of death. I say we break those chains. Break the chains of fear and
you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society. Could
you imagine it? Mars could be ours. It could belong to the colonists
who slaved here, died here.” Her face is easier to see as night fades
through the clear roof. It is alive, on re. “If you led the others to
freedom. The things you could do, Darrow. The things you could
make happen.” She pauses and I see her eyes are glistening. “It
chills me when I think of the things you could do. You have been
given so, so much, but you set your sights so low.”
“You repeat the same damn points,” I say bitterly. “You think a
dream is worth dying for. I say it isn’t. You say it’s better to die on
your feet. I say it’s better to live on our knees.”
“You’re not even living!” she snaps. “We are machine men with
machine minds, machine lives.…”
“And machine hearts?” I ask. “That’s what I am?”
“Darrow …”
“What do you live for?” I ask her suddenly. “Is it for me? Is it for
family and love? Or is it for some dream?”
“It’s not just some dream, Darrow. I live for the dream that my
children will be born free. That they will be what they like. That
they will own the land their father gave them.”
“I live for you,” I say sadly.
She kisses my cheek. “Then you must live for more.”
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There’s a long, terrible silence that stretches between us. She does
not understand how her words wrench my heart, how she can twist
me so easily. Because she does not love me like I love her. Her mind
is too high. Mine too low. Am I not enough for her?
“You said you had another gift for me?” I say, changing the
subject.
She shakes her head. “Some other time. The sun rises. Watch it
with me once, at least.”
We lie in silence and watch light slip into the sky as though it
were a tide of ink made from re. It is unlike anything I could have
ever dreamed of. I can’t stop the tears that well in the corners of my
eyes as the world beyond turns to light and the greens and browns
and yellows of the trees in the room are revealed. It is beauty. It is a
dream.
I am silent as we return to the grimness of the gray ducts. The
tears linger in my eyes and as the majesty of what I saw fades; I
wonder what Eo wants of me. Does she want me to take my
slingBlade and start a rebellion? I would die. My family would die.
She would die, and nothing would make me risk her. She knows
that.
I am puzzling out what her other gift may be when we exit the
ducts for the Webbery. I roll rst from the duct and extend a hand
back to her when I hear a voice. It is accented, oily, from Earth.
“Reds in our gardens,” it oozes. “Ain’t that a thing.”
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