Away to the east, a bank of cloud rose to glaring turrets too bright to look at, but the bottoms had a dirty, smeared look. Sea-storms, the big storms of summer; it might rain for days. Some years they missed the colony entirely; some years they had suffered through two or three of them, losing most of a harvest. Though she usually slept in the heat of afternoon, she pushed herself to her feet, sighing, and picked up the basket. She would harvest anything ripe today, and check the machines yet again before the storm arrived.
That afternoon, fitful gusts turned the leaves of the garden plants over, showing the pale undersides. She picked steadily, moving from house to house. At each, she checked that shutters and doors were closed and barred, that toolsheds were properly secured. A skin of cloud moved across the sky, high up, changing the warm yellow of the sun to a milky glare. The air thickened; she felt breathless, stifled yet shivering from time to time with an odd chill. The house filled with baskets of ripe tomatoes, beans, peppers, squash, gourds, melons; their rich scent lay in drifts. When the first spatter of rain fell, she left off picking, and went to the center.
The barometer showed falling pressure, as she expected, and the weather warning buzzed. She shut it off, and called up the satellite display. She had not realized that it still worked, that the company had left a weather satellite aloft. Now the screen showed the cloudy spiral still offshore, the edge of the clouds just touching land. She looked at the numbers displayed on the margins of the screen, and wondered what they meant. Enough that it was a big storm, and about to engulf her. She should get the animals into the town, if she could . . . in such storms the river flooded, and the cattle could be swept away.
When she went back to the outside door, windblown rain scoured the lane, and a fine mist sprayed her when she looked out. It was almost dark; she could barely see the shapes of the buildings. She was not going out in the dark and rain to find stupid cattle who ought to have the sense to find high ground. She was going home, when the squall passed.
Between squalls, the air lay heavily around her, moist and intrusive as an unwanted lover. She splashed through the puddles, aware of odd noises from a distance. Was that oncoming wind rushing in the forest? Were those squeaks and grunts from wind-bent wood, or animals? In her own house, the scent of all those vegetables and fruits was overpowering in the damp warmth. She found a handlight, and went around the house checking the shutters, barring them with the heavy boards needed in storms. Then the kitchen door, the outside louvered door and the inside solid one. She came in through the door to the lane, and shut the louvered outer door, latching it firmly. She would leave the inner door open until later, when the wind came that way.
She had time to make more flatbread, fry onions and fresh vegetables to eat with it, and eat a peaceful supper, before the next squall came with a blast of wind that forced a draft through the kitchen door. Just try it, she thought to the storm. She and Humberto had built the house solidly, and kept it in repair. It had held in worse wind than this.
She went to bed in the squall, and fell asleep, hardly waking when one squall followed another with breathless pauses between. In the morning, no light filtered through the double shutters. She didn’t need to look to know that the main storm pressed on the village now. She could hear the howl of the wind between the buildings, feel the drafts squeezed through every crevice by that immense force. She turned on the lights, glad that they still worked. They had worked in other storms, but she remembered from her childhood on another world that the power plants could fail in storms.
It was strange to feel so hot and breathless, with all that wind outside, and those little drafts tickling her feet like mice. She made herself fix a breakfast she didn’t really want, one of the golden melons from someone else’s garden. She hoped she would smell it less once she had eaten it, but the cloying scent hung in the air. She could open a window on the downwind side. She went back in the bedroom, and opened the inside shutters. The smell of melon followed her, oozed past her out the window. She stepped into the corner of the room, then jumped as a bolt of lightning struck nearby, the white light spearing in through the louvers; the crack of thunder sounded as if someone had hit her head with a shovel.
She could stand the heavy smell of melon better than that. When her breath steadied, she closed the inner shutters and lay down on the bed. The bed did not feel safe enough. Reluctantly, she got up, and dragged off the bedspread and pillows. The closet would be airless, but safe from lightning. She made a nest there, and curled up.
