Jonah took a chance—he was in enough trouble already without offending the Oldest Female, who had undergone thirty-four pregnancies and still had six living womb-fruit—four of them precious females.
But grandmother seemed in a good mood, distracted by memories …
Jonah took off, clambering higher till he could reach with his left hand for one of the independent dangle vines that sometimes laced the gaps between pinyons. With his right hand he flicked with his belt knife, severing the dangler a meter or so below his knees. Sheathing the blade and taking a deep breath, he launched off, swinging across an open space in the forest … and finally alighting along a second giant bole. It shook from his impact and Jonah worried. If this one was weakened, and I’m the reason that it falls, I could be in for real punishment. Not just grandma-tending duty!
A “rascal’s” reputation might have been harmless, when Jonah was younger. But now, the mothers were pondering what Tairee Dome might have to pay, in dowry, for some other bubble colony to take him. A boy known to be unruly might not get any offers, at any marriage price … and a man without a wife-sponsor led a marginal existence.
But honestly, this last time wasn’t my fault! How am I supposed to make an improved pump without filling something with high-pressure water? All right, the kitchen rice cooker was a poor choice. But it has a gauge and everything … or, it used to.
After quivering far too long, the great vine held. With a brief sense of relief, he scrambled around to the other side. There was no convenient dangler, this time, but another pinyon towered fairly close. Jonah flexed his legs, prepared, and launched himself across the gap, hurtling with open arms, alighting with shock and painful clumsiness. He didn’t wait though, scurrying to the other side—where there was another dangle vine, well positioned for a wide-spanning swing.
This time he couldn’t help himself while hurtling across open space, giving vent to a yell of exhilaration.
Two swings and four leaps later, he was right next to the bubble’s edge, reaching out to stroke the nearest patch of ancient, vitrified stone, in a place where no one would see him break taboo. Pushing at the transparent barrier, Jonah felt deep ocean pressure shoving back. The texture felt rough-ribbed, uneven. Sliver flakes rubbed off, dusting his hand.
“Of course, bubbles were younger then,” the old woman said. “More flexible.”
Jonah had to wrap a length of dangle vine around his left wrist and clutch the pinyon with his toes, in order to lean far out and bring his face right up against the bubble—it sucked heat into bottomless cold—using his right hand and arm to cup around his face and peer into the blackness outside. Adapting vision gradually revealed the stony walls of Cleopatra Canyon, the narrow-deep canyon where humanity had come to take shelter so very long ago. Fleeing the Coss invaders. Before the life spans of many grandmothers.
Several strings of globelike habitats lay parallel along the canyon bottom, like pearls on a necklace, each of them surrounded by a froth of smaller bubbles … though fewer of the little ones than there were in olden times, and none anymore in the most useful sizes. It was said that, way back at the time of the Founding, there used to be faint illumination overhead, filtering downward from the surface and demarking night from day: light that came from the mythological god-thing that old books called the sun, so fierce that it could penetrate both dense, poisonous clouds and the ever-growing ocean.
But that was way back in a long-ago past, when the sea had not yet burgeoned so, filling canyons, becoming a dark and mighty deep. Now the only gifts that fell from above were clots of detritus that men gathered to feed algae ponds. Debris that got stranger every year.
These days the canyon walls could only be seen by light from the bubbles themselves, by their pinyon glow within. Jonah turned slowly left to right, counting and naming those farm enclaves he could see. Amtor … Leininger … Chown … Kuttner … Okumo … each one a clan with traditions and styles all their own. Each one possibly the place where Tairee tribe might sell him in a marriage pact. A mere boy and good riddance. Good at numbers and letters. A bit skilled with his hands, but notoriously absentminded, prone to staring at nothing, and occasionally putting action to rascally thoughts.
He kept tallying: Brakutt … Lewis … Atari … Napeer … Aldrin … what?
Jonah blinked. What was happening to Aldrin? And the bubble just beyond it. Both Aldrin and Bezo were still quivering. He could make out few details at this range through the milky, pitted membrane. But one of the two was rippling and convulsing, the glimmer of its pinyon forest shaking back and forth as the giant boles swayed … then collapsed!
The other distant habitat seemed to be inflating. Or so Jonah thought at first. Rubbing his eyes and pressing even closer, as Bezo habitat grew bigger …
… or else it was rising! Jonah could not believe what he saw. Torn loose, somehow, from the ocean floor, the entire bubble was moving. Upward. And as Bezo ascended, its flattened bottom now reshaped itself as farms and homes and lagoons tumbled together into the base of the accelerating globe. With its pinyons still mostly in place, Bezo Colony continued glowing as it climbed upward.
Aghast, and yet compelled to look, Jonah watched until the glimmer that had been Bezo finally vanished in blackness, accelerating toward the poison surface of Venus.
Then, without warning or mercy, habitat Aldrin imploded.
2.
“I WAS BORN IN BEZO, YOU KNOW.”
Jonah turned to see Enoch leaning on his rake, staring south along the canyon wall, toward a gaping crater where that ill-fated settlement bubble used to squat. Distant glimmers of glow lamps flickered over there as crews prowled along the Aldrin debris field, sifting for salvage. But that was a job for mechanics and senior workers. Meanwhile, the algae ponds and pinyons must be fed, so Jonah also found himself outside, in coveralls that stank and fogged from his own breath and many generations of previous wearers, helping to gather the week’s harvest of organic detritus.
Jonah responded in the same dialect Enoch had used. Click-Talk. The only way to converse, when both of you are deep underwater.
“Come on,” he urged his older friend, a recent, marriage-price immigrant to Tairee Bubble. “All of that is behind you. A male should never look back. We do as we are told.”
Enoch shrugged—broad shoulders making his stiff coveralls scrunch around the helmet, fashioned from an old foam bubble of a size no longer found in these parts. Enoch’s phlegmatic resignation was an adaptive skill that served him well, as he was married to Jonah’s cousin, Jezzy, an especially strong-willed young woman, bent on exerting authority and not above threatening her new husband with casting-out.
I can hope for someone gentle, when I’m sent to live beside a stranger in a strange dome.
Jonah resumed raking up newly fallen organic stuff—mostly ropy bits of vegetation that lay limp and pressure-crushed after their long tumble to the bottom. In recent decades, there had also been detritus of another kind. Shells that had holes in them for legs and heads. And skeleton fragments from slinky creatures that must have—when living—stretched as long as Jonah was tall! Much more complicated than the mud worms that kept burrowing closer to the domes of late. More like the fabled snakes or fish that featured in tales from Old Earth.
Panalina’s dad—old Scholar Wu—kept a collection of skyfalls in the little museum by Tairee’s eastern arc, neatly labeled specimens dating back at least ten grandmother cycles, to the era when light and heat still came down along with debris from above—a claim that Jonah still deemed mystical. Perhaps just a legend, like Old Earth.