As in the kitchen, they moved around, looking at everything making soft noises that she could not help but assume were language of some sort. Ofelia squatted down with a grunt of her own and tried to drag the wet mattress out from under the table. It had absorbed enough water to add kilos to its weight, and it stuck to the damp floor beneath it. She yanked harder, wishing she had had the sense to prop it up on something in the first place. Of course, she hadn’t meant to have the door open and rain blowing in. She still couldn’t remember whether she herself had left it open when she went out to walk in the calm at the heart of the storm. Not that it mattered, really.
She tugged again and again, and the mattress resisted. Suddenly, four bony odd-shaped hands with long dark nails gripped it; it slid suddenly towards her and she fell backwards. The mattress landed on her feet. She looked over; two of the creatures, still holding the mattress, were watching her. “Thank you,” she said. It was important to thank children, if they were trying to help, even if they got it wrong. That way they would keep trying. She dragged her feet out from under the mattress, levered herself up to a squat again, and tugged. They tugged. With her guidance, they got the mattress out from under the table and up on end, propped sagging against a wall.
Ofelia put her hands to her back, and sighed. Tonight she would sleep in her own bed, if she was still alive, and rest. She looked around. One of the creatures was poking at the loose beads; another had picked up her beaded and fringed netted garment and was shaking it softly, listening to the sounds it made. Children! Always into things, always moving things, always making messes. “That’s mine,” she said. The heads turned, the eyes stared. It wasn’t quite as bad now; she knew they could stare very well without doing anything else. She took the garment from the one who held it — it released it to her without resistance — and then realized they could have no idea what it was for. “It’s a dress,” she said. She might as well show them; it wasn’t as if they were people, who might make comments about her handiwork.
She wriggled into the garment, enjoying as before the feel of it against her — she had finally gotten that set of beads in just the right place, and the itchy place just under her shoulderblade now had an automatic scratcher every time she moved. Her hands moved without her thought, touching the beads, the bits of bright color and softness and smoothness and texture.
“That’s better,” she said.
“Zzzzt…” said one of them, pointing its long hard fingernail at her.
“No. Not zzzzt. I made this.” Her hands spread, then she picked up a loose bead and threaded it onto one of her twisted-grass strings. “I like to make things.” She picked up another bead, a tiny spacer, then another larger one, and showed them. They all approached; she sensed real interest.
CHAPTER NINE
Ofelia finally elected to sleep in the control room. She simply could not be sure that the creatures would leave it alone otherwise. Not that they couldn’t push her aside, if they chose to, but so far they hadn’t. She collected an armful of dry fabric from the sewing rooms, and spread it on the floor for a mattress. She had slept on worse. The night before, she reminded herself, she had slept on the bare damp floor with a roomful of aliens.
She shut the door in their faces. They made noises through the door, and she ignored them. She spread her material next to the door, and lay down, grunting with exhaustion and aching joints. She really was too old for this. She could not think of a time when it would have been easy, but now she resented it with additional vigor. She had been living exactly as she pleased since the other colonists left, constrained only by what she thought of as real things: weather, the needs of her garden crops, or the animals. Now she was sleeping — or rather, not sleeping — on a hard floor instead of her own bed simply because some pesky aliens that reminded her too much of demanding children couldn’t be trusted to stay out of the control room. Like children, they could do immense harm without even knowing it, and unlike children they offered no compensations: she had no desire at all to cuddle them. If she slept, she would wake up stiff and sore. If she didn’t sleep, she would be exhausted in the morning, and there they would be, brighteyed as children, who always got the sleep they needed, no matter what happened to the adults. It was the end of her life. It was supposed to be simple. She had been so sure she’d worked it out at last. The end, she’d assumed, would be unpleasant, but at least it would be private. No one would disturb her; no one would wake her up, demand things from her.
She dozed for awhile, waking as uncomfortably as she’d expected, but unaccountably happy. From outside soft sounds came through the door… rhythmic sounds, harmonious sounds. Music? Were the alien creatures making music?
She had never thought of aliens as making music. She had never known any musicians at all. Music came from boxes: from cube players, from transmitted entertainment. Sometimes she had seen, in a cube drama, someone actually making music, and far back in her life, in the primary school, the children had been taught music appreciation. She could still remember the field trip to the symphony rehearsal. But no one she knew could play an instrument. Everyone sang, of course. Some better, some worse, but all mothers, she supposed, hummed to their babies. All couples in love sometimes sang along with favorite songs, strolling down a crowded street… she and Caitano had. But Humberto had told her she couldn’t carry a tune, and after that she sang only for the babies, tuneless murmurings that soothed them. The other women had sung, sometimes, as they worked together, but she had never joined in. How did those creatures make music? She tried to think of the things they carried on those straps slung around them. Sacks and gourds, mostly, and the long knives in their sheaths. No instrument she had seen a picture of would fit into those shapes. Were they just singing and pounding the floor? She edged off her inadequate pad of cloth and cautiously opened the door a crack. She could not see them; they must be down the hall somewhere. But she could hear better, and what she heard had a lilting, laughing quality that made her chuckle even as she told herself it was ridiculous. DA-dah-dah DIM-duh DIM-duh DIM-duh… and a tune that tickled her ears. It wasn’t quite right, she thought; perhaps they all sang flat, the way Humberto had said she did, or perhaps their music was simply that different. But it was music, and she had to know how it was made. She told herself that her joints hurt too much to go back to sleep.
She opened the door wider and put her head out. Nothing to see. Light spreading from the open door of one of the sewing rooms. A faint whiff of unpleasant odor from the floor, where they’d cleaned up their messes. And that sound.
Slowly, silently, Ofelia crawled down the hall toward the light. Now she could hear complex underrhythms, little sounds much like seeds in a seed pod, or a handful of beads. A haunting, breathy sound carrying the tune, a sound she identified with no instrument she knew. And something else, something that tingled in her ears.
When she peered around the door, they were all sitting in a ring; they had pushed the long tables to one side. She could not see much, but she could see that one of them had a set of tubes up to its mouth. It must be blowing them. The elbows of one with its back to her moved, and a tangle of notes rang out above the melody. Ofelia felt tears burning her eyes. What was that? Suddenly the others began to chant something, more or less along with the instruments. One held up a hand, and they lowered their voices abruptly; several glanced in the direction Ofelia would have been had she been in the control room. If they had been humans, that would have been awareness of someone sleeping, someone who should not be disturbed. But these were aliens. What were they thinking? She crouched against the wall of the hall, not looking, just listening. Their voices together had a roughspun quality, more like thick crochet or knitted fabric than fine weaving. Her ears liked it, as her hands liked thick soft yarn better than thin thread. She did not know she had gone to sleep in their music until she woke to find them standing over her. She had fallen asleep half-sitting against the wall; she had a crick in her neck, and her mouth felt dirty and used. She blinked up at them. One still held the handful of tubes. It blew into them now, soft breathy sounds, notes that might have been no more than the wind around corners except they were so pure. Then the creature cocked its head to one side.