A blue and gold substance as if mining itself had worked its way to the surface near the foundations of the first major dwelling complex we had begun; then this vein sometimes extended outward, like a spoke, surfacing gradually, yet in fact inward toward where the weather vehicle had touched down. Metal clay, earth flesh — was it food for a new species or the start of one? The substance had some milky fume belying its strength, but its fine, easy coming gave us hour by hour, day by day, ideas of its use which were like refinements released by an ore.
I told my child it was not the end of the world. No surprise, said my child.
Was the crater a resource? The cliffs grew translucent, mauve, dark green, orange before the sunset and the dawn as if to impart that color to the coming change of light. Along the escarpments scans had discerned a self-mining substance. WC advisers declared it a danger. It was here, from my point of view, when we wanted it; and we went about our work. I have said “here” meaning “there.” We would hear How labs a thousand miles off clamoring that the cells discovered in the vehicle must be tested before they worked some more terrible completion. Voices reported near the vehicle and near the cliffs would perhaps be subject to tensor tests as of a new faith possessed possibly of an energy-conserving, waste-dissolving secret “covered” by its claim that that original nation’s self-immolating bomb had contained itself by communal will, which formula compensated its citizens for the loss of former life and limb by giving them those Shimmer relations so seminal that to seal the border of their energy-splitting blast that awesome night was second nature and like the five-finger exercise of what I had heard called (with a capital G) Grace. Hardly my view. WC followed the logic of all this out and announced a competition among How labs for solution to the “problem” doubtless geomorphic and metallurgical arising in our new crater country.
Word came to us that at a buffet marking the progress of this competition, the WC accused us of unilaterally challenging the global federated union. A senior How said, “We have not yet disarmed,” and she was greeted with a thunder of applause of hands then disquietingly aware of having felt in their palms the senior How think the words, We have not yet begun to fight.
I have written this informal history of, I hope, my child as well as me: yet also of what became possible for me when I and my child joined the teacher at her mountain station and found a small group of grownups and children often easy to distinguish without being seen. The livelihood I found with the teacher, so different in her views from me, and with my child who, an instinctive astronomer, points out the constellations to me in broad daylight — the green freedom of our chores in short — has left time to put into these words, if not the formula, the materials covered by it as in a calculus that sums up increasingly smaller everyday things by an infinite process to reach a finite answer so you know where you are. At least some notes toward an understanding of what happened, the hopes arising, and the hope against hope — if that saying is ever clear — with which we stay here, determined to come down from the village one day in some time-frame, though remaining uncertain what is this human nature we possess.
Am I myself? Shimmer Theory I leave to others. It will come to me when it comes. Shimmers in my system, however, even my desire for this woman who beguiles me and my child, telling me I teach her (because somehow we need to thank and give credit for what may be more deeply and strangely ours from the first), show me night after night until I have brought them into day a future with my people and the new thoughts each day voiced and unvoiced of our colony: yet a future for myself, alternating like blinks, like particle with wave, risk with mere happiness, a pioneering exploration of the crater risky in the extreme, descending the very colors of the blast-bereft walls to the floor and what it promises and what it may cost.
SILK, OR THE WOMAN WITH THE BIKE
It was a job — a lab coworker at his elbow at first, he at hers, drop by drop of cell solution a thrill for her it seemed every time. He came as a surprise hire the lab thought could help out with commercial applications, of all things. But it was him they wanted, genius or journeyman.
It was a job, the new job the man went to by choice in the very late-afternoon rush hour by bike, subway, bike. He took his bike on the subway thinking ahead, to what he did yesterday, the day before, and the day before that, and what he again would do today adjusting ring clamps on tissue baths mounted to steel support rods. His pride was the bind that somehow got absorbed in these underground motions of vehicle within vehicle enclosing him. A bike in the subway car. Spinning wheels at rest for six stops inside the clamorous song of the train. Tracking the tunnel forgetting what his new job was not.
Yet now the doors burst open and it was another bicycle, a woman bringing it aboard, parking it up against the steel pole, the straight handlebar of a fancy hybrid tipping the man’s bike on the other side of the pole while a girl and boy, lovers realizing this was their stop, struggled to get by the bikes as the doors tried to close. He heard the woman with the bike say, harshly, distinctly, “What is it? I look like someone you know?” It was nothing, he tried to say with a look. Though then, “Probably,” he said, thinking hell she didn’t know who she was talking to. To hear her speak, she was quite unafraid. Or it was where she was coming from, a woman almost haggard, almost beautiful. Irritable. Short with him. Not just your blunt city person in passing, and not passing but arrived like a coincidence.
“No brakes?” she bobbed her head at his old bike. The seat was covered in a faded supermarket bag furled with a rubber band around the post just below the clamp assembly. Did she betray a smile looking away at the crowded car? Probably not, this woman in her beret and little scarf. He waited for her eyes. “Messenger?” she said. Was she looking through the open window at the dark tunnel wall in motion now? Her bike perhaps suited her, but she was not quite a bicyclist.
At the far end a space had opened where a man lay half-curled across several seats. Lost soul, his smell stained the air. His knobby head scarred, you could see stitches in the scalp raised and blue. A soda bottle and a can rolled across the floor and back at serious angles. “Not even a messenger,” the woman said out of the side of her mouth. “I’m overqualified,” he said. “You?” she said. In a subway train running north, their bike spokes glistened and the angry tunnel was a slow-stroke piston cylinder falling south. The derelict at the far end of the car woke violently staggering up onto his feet. His pants were half down, something dropping from under his thread-bare overcoat. What was it that dropped, a piece of him? He kicked a bottle which hit someone, a hawk-eyed woman in a windbreaker. He’s looking about him as if he doesn’t recognize this place though he is a veteran of the line surely. And would you believe this fellow bike-person, this woman going on about your bike: “What do you call that?” she pointed.
“It’s an old Schwinn.”
“Yeah, does it have brakes? I noticed it,” she was contemptuous but more than that.
“You did?”
She had nothing to say, but then, “Where did you get it?” she added. She was subtly tired, preoccupied. Why did he think she didn’t know bikes? “Out of work?” she said then.