Then one, two, three again. The series went on. Triplet, then pause. Triplet, then pause. Then a responsive sound. Was it what she expected? It seemed very loud to me.
My limbs wanted to jerk, to pull free. They could not move. The sounds outside increased …
I heard her feet hurry off. Somewhere nearby, hidden in the trees, she would conceal herself to wait, and watch, until she could return to let me go …
I do not like remembering that time. Sometimes the whole thing comes back on me, all at once, before I have had a chance to shut it out. I cry out, then. I stand shivering. People pretend not to see me, turning their eyes away until I have shaken the memory off and closed the door upon it. I do not like remembering that time, so I shall remember something else instead.
I shall remember when I was a child in Cochim-Mahn.
Dinadhi girl-children have much to learn. Clay between the hands and the whirl of the wheel. Wool and cotton between the fingers and the twist of the spindle. The weight of brush and broom, the long hours at the loom. The feel of the grindstone under one’s palms, the bend of the back when dropping seeds into the holes made by the planting stick. The setting of the solar cooker to gather all the sun’s heat. The forward thrust of the head against the tump line, bringing down wood for the winter. A woman must be always busy if her family is to be clad and shod and fed and kept warm, so a girl-child is taught to be constantly busy as well.
Once each left-thumb day—it is how we count days: little-finger day, lesser twin, longer twin, point-finger day, thumb day; right hand first, then left, making a double hand; five double hands to the month; twelve months to the year, plus the eight or nine extra days Daylight Woman gives us at harvest time. As I say, once every left-thumb day, my mother went to the sanctuary cells of Bernesohn Famber, taking me with her as her mother had taken her. Famber was not there, of course. He had become an outlander ghost a long time before, in the time of my great-grandmother. Still, he had paid for a hundred-year lease, paid for cells allocated to him and secured against intrusion or extradition for one hundred standard years. The
price for such a lease includes food and cleaning. The food mostly came from off-planet, but the cleaning was done by us.
Each tenth day we took brooms and brushes and soft old rags and went into his cell, which is around the back of the main hive, on the cave-floor level, in a kind of protrusion built out from the body of the hive. We don’t like outlanders stumbling about among us in the hive, so our leasehold has its own entrance. In case an outlander needs help at night, there is a corridor that comes into a storeroom of the hive, but it is seldom used except by those who serve the outlanders.
The Cochim-Mahn leasehold is three cells built around a toilet place. We don’t use the manure of outlanders in our fungus cellars. There is some feeling it might kill the fungus. Instead we buy these closet things from the Alliance for our leaseholders to use, and when they get used up, we trade for new ones. So Bernesohn Famber’s place was a little corridor with five doors in it, one to the hive storeroom, one to the toilet, and three more to the three cells. The cell nearest the front, nearest the lip of the cave, had a door to the outside as well. All of the rooms had lie-down shelves around the sides. One back room was where Famber had slept, one he had used for storage, and the one with the door to the outside had his worktable and a comfortable chair and many strange devices and machines. These, Mama told me, were recorders and computers and analyzers, to help Bernesohn Famber with his work.
“What was his work?” I always asked, each and every time.