Only at the end of the meeting, when she stood up and turned around, did she notice the Company rep, standing at the door. He had the sleek, youthful look of a shipman, someone whose skin never saw starlight but through a hatch. No sun had baked him; no winter had frozen him; no rains had washed, or winds dried, him. In his crisp, clean clothes, his polished shoes, he looked like an alien. He said nothing. Before anyone could speak to him, he had turned and walked away, into the darkness. Ofelia wondered if he knew about the slimetrails, but of course he would have shipeyes; he would be able to see where colonists could not.
The next morning, Ofelia rose at dawn and went out into the garden, barefooted as always and wearing her oldest workshirt. Until the sun rose, she refused to wear her hat, and so she saw the movement along the lane beyond the garden, the Company reps in their crisp shipclothes. Many of them. All wearing the same blue-gray uniforms the color of morning fog, with the Sims Bancorp logo.
One of them stopped to stare back at her. “Ma’am,” he said, unsmiling but polite.
The thing she loved most about dawn was the silence, the emptiness of it. He stood there, as if he had a right to ruin her morning solitude. He was going to ask questions, and in courtesy she must answer them. She sighed, and looked away, hoping he would think her too old and fuddled to be worth his time.
“Ma’am, did you vote last night?”
He wasn’t going away. She looked at him, seeing the youth, the differentness . . . the skin untouched by weather, the eyes that stared right at her as if he had the right. . . .
“Yes,” she said shortly. Then, because courtesy would not allow her to be so abrupt, she found herself saying, “I don’t know what to call you . . . I don’t mean to be rude.”
He smiled, genuinely amused. Was courtesy so rare among the shipfolk still? “I wasn’t offended,” he said. He came nearer. “Are those
He had not answered her question. She would have to be more direct. “I cannot talk to someone when I have no way to address them,” she said. “My name is Sera Ofelia.”
“Oh—I’m Jorge. Sorry. You reminded me of my grandmother; she calls me Ajo. But—do they really grow like this, in the open . . . contaminated?”
Ofelia stroked the leaves with her hand, releasing the heavy scent. “Yes, these are tomatoes, and yes, they grow in the open air. They have no tomatoes now, of course; they are just blooming.” She turned up several leaves to show him the clusters of flower-buds.
“It’s too bad,” he said, in the tone of one who is politely regretting some inconvenience he will not himself endure. “You have such a garden, and it’s wasted—”
“Nothing is wasted,” Ofelia said.
“But you’re leaving in thirty days,” the young man said. She reminded herself that his name was Jorge and he had a grandmother who loved him. That seemed impossible; he could have popped from a gliss-wrapped package like the holiday gifts of her childhood, brightly colored and smooth all over. Surely he had not been born in blood and mess like real children. “You don’t have to work in the garden anymore. You should be packing.”
“I like working in the garden,” Ofelia said. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to find out what had just changed in her, somewhere inside, when he said “But you’re leaving.” She looked down. On the ground, on top of the mulch, a slimerod oozed along looking for something to puncture with its one hard part, its little hollow cylinder of shell. Ofelia picked it up by its soft hinder end and watched it lengthen until it was at least ten centimeters long and thin as yarn. Then she flicked it around with a practiced snap of the wrist, and cracked its shell on her other thumb. It made her thumb sting a moment, but it was worth the sting for the look of shocked horror on the young man’s face.
“What was
“Can it go through . . . shoes?” He was staring now at her bare feet. Ofelia grinned to herself, and made a show of scratching the back of one leg with her other foot.
“It depends on the shoes,” she said. She supposed it might go through a pair of thin cloth shoes with holes in them already. And it didn’t go through human skin (she didn’t know why) but she didn’t say that. Mostly it went through the stems of her plants, not finding what it wanted and leaving wounds the plants spent precious calories mending. But if it made the young man sick enough to go away, she would imply horrors.
“I guess you’ll be glad to leave,” the young man said.
