A foot-pedal powered loom.
A device with weights that wound up and turned the spit.
He was thinking about the small, wind-powered millstone he was making to replace her hand quern while he tied up his horse on his weekly trip to town—and saw Marya’s sister Innis on the punishment stool.
For a second he almost thought it was Marya there. The sisters looked much alike, as though Innis were a younger, prettier, but somehow less formed copy of her sister.
He walked slowly toward her.
Stooling wasn’t meant to be a physical punishment. The “stool” had arms and a high back, comfortable padding, even a canopy to keep off the Sun’s heat or the rain. Instead, stooling was a public portrayal of guilt; it was the isolation, the carefully avoided stares, the knowledge of universal condemnation that formed the penalty.
It was custom, when one of the community was stooled, that each passerby stop and offer to the sitter a heartfelt wish along the lines of, “May your repentance come easily,” or “The Creator welcomes the blackest of sinners, if that sinner regrets and repents.” Innis flicked him a glance as he approached, his wooden-soled boots making a sucking sound as he pulled them out of the mud. Dirty tear streaks runneled down her round, still childish face, but the swollen, reddened gray eyes were sullenly defiant.
“Why, Innis?” he asked softly.
“I won’t marry him,” she replied. “So they call me disobedient.”
“Young Rossetti?”
She nodded, eyes as downcast as her sternest critic could wish. Only Sergei could see the repressed anger in the full childishly pouted lips.
“Someone else?” he asked softly, thinking that if there were, as Marya’s husband, he might have some influence.
She shook her head, biting her lip.
“Then why not Rossetti? He’s a handsome enough youngster, hard working, excellent prospects.”
“They chose him, not me. I don’t even like him.” Her mouth made a spitting gesture. “Even if I did, I don’t want to get married, not yet anyway. And never to him; he’ll beat me.”
“What? How—”
“His father beats his mother.” She spoke with the simple shrewdness otherwise unintelligent people sometimes display. “I’ve heard her scream. Pietro’s very like his father.”
“They can’t make you marry against your will, wait and see. There’ll be someone you want to marry—or—” She was looking at him just as Marya had, when she refused to discuss Innis. It was a look that reminded him that these people had been stubbornly living their way for generations, that they had developed subtleties that he, the outsider, could never understand. In a flash of insight, he realized that their world had been as eager to get rid of them, as they had been to leave it. None of which solved Innis’s problem.
Elder Werner dismissed all his arguments with: “It’s settled. Both fathers agree. She could do far worse, you know.”
“But she’s so young. Wouldn’t it be better to wait?”
“You think all our girls marry as late as your Marya? No, no. Someone would have snapped her up long since, if her mother hadn’t been ill and her presence needed. But Goodwife Waters has rejoined the Creator, and Goodman Waters’s year of mourning is over and he is eager to remarry. As soon as young Innis is safely settled; it’s not good to have two females trying to run the same household, you understand. And that’s final.” He stood on his porch, the bag of seed he had been closing left untended for the moment so he could give all his attention to Sergei, his gaze kept carefully away from the green where Innis sat in the stool. (All the council had farms within easy walk or ride of town, and homes by the small square, so that they were available for town business.)
“But—”
“No. No more, Goodman Andersen.” His pipe pointed suddenly at Sergei, an accusing finger, Werner himself suddenly as straight as Gabriel about to blow his trumpet. “I thought you would understand, but I see you don’t. I blamed you, and I was wrong, so I’ll speak plainly, for your sake and the colony’s.”
“Was I wrong to speak out for Innis? She’s Marya’s sister, after all.”
“Innis? She’s but a girl. Bridal nerves is all that ails her, a young girl’s fancies. She’ll soon enough see that older and wiser heads know best. No. ’Tis you who are walking a dangerous road. Goodman Andersen—Friend Sergei—you must cease this making of new tools!”
Sergei’s mouth dropped open and hung foolishly.
“The wheel.” Werner ticked them off on his fingers. “The loom. The spit.”
“But—but—but—they’re hand-made. Within the agreement. Half a dozen of the women already have copies of Marya’s wheel.”
“Oh, aye. More than that, I’d say. More than that. While those who don’t are nagging their husbands or fathers to make them one, as soon as may be.”
“I don’t understand.” Automatically he bent down, ran the twine draw through the last two pairs of holes in the top of the bag and knotted off. “They’re handmade, and soon every woman will have one, so where’s the problem?”
Even this late in the day, the town thrummed with activity. Down to the smallest child, all had chores. Werner himself had been loading a wagon with seed for his farm. Now, as if to emphasize what came next, or perhaps to think out exactly how he wanted to say it, he paused to sling two more heavy bags up onto the wagon. Without being asked, Sergei heaved the third and last bag, the one he had knotted closed, from the ground onto the top of the heap.
Werner shook his head, slowly. “Aye.” A sigh. “You don’t understand. I’ll be patient with you, then. You know—with your mind, with your intellect—why we came here, why we fled the soulless Sodom and Gomorrah machine world that bred us. But your heart is blind. We came here—” the pipe came out of his mouth, its stem pointing at him in emphasis, “—to live—Our—Own—Way. To live on the land, and with the land, but never, ever, never off the land.”
“What harm can a spinning wheel do?”
“None if you stopped with the wheel. But you didn’t, did you? If we let it, it won’t stop until we’re back to the world we came from, with the soulless machines both our slaves and our masters, and the children ruined before they can scarce draw breath. No. You must stop! Understand! Stop—or you will be stopped.”
Sergei nodded, slowly. “I understand.”
“Do you? Good. You’re my friend, and my cousin by marriage. But you’ve been breaking our laws. It was ignorance. As long as it doesn’t happen again, we’ll say no more about it. But don’t do it again, Friend Sergei. Because lawbreakers will be punished.”
The baby was born two days later, and they named him Schemuel, after Marya’s father. (Sergei hadn’t the vaguest idea who his father had been.) The birth was hard, and both Marya and Schemuel were weak and ill, after. Sergei spent days that stretched into weeks, going from one patient to the other, staying up nights with the sick woman, the fretful infant, his work and his land neglected. Until one day he realized, horrified, that it was spring planting time, and past. So he called the computer again, and got diagrams for a simple seed drill, that harried and readied the soil and planted, all in one operation.
When his seed was safely planted, he took the drill apart again, and said nothing.
But he didn’t want to upset Marya with what Elder Werner had said, so he simply vowed to himself that the seed drill would be the end of it.
When Marya was well enough, they entered fully in the life of the colony, driving kilometers in the jolting wagon to attend a barn-raising, join a haying crew, or whatever.