Saturday, looking into Maire’s eyes, felt Maire’s grief as though it had happened to Saturday herself. She thought of Jep, and how she would feel if Jep were killed. Or Friday, her own brother. Or any of the people of Settlement One. She laid her hands upon Maire’s callused ones where they were knotted together in Maire’s lap, wet with the tears that dripped from her eyes unheeded.
“No more, Maire,” she said. “It will not happen anymore.” It was only a comforting phrase, not a promise. She had no way of making it a promise, and yet it was as a promise that Maire heard it, or perhaps felt it, not for this land alone but for all those she had left behind in Voorstod as well.
FOUR
• In Settlement Three, hostilities between production teams had kept Topman Harribon Kruss occupied for a good part of the afternoon. Someone on Team Two had said something derogatory to someone on Team Four. No, not someone. Jamel Soames had said it. Jamel Soames, backed up by the five other Soames brothers. Then Team Four had retaliated with fists and a few hand tools. Team Two had been working with an irrigation pump, so they had escalated the battle with a quickly devised water cannon. One field had been completely soaked and trampled and would have to be dried out and replanted. Another one had been almost ready for a leaf-crop harvest which was now futile. One settler had a broken jaw; there were other broken bones, as well as assorted abrasions, strains, and cuts.
Topman Harribon Kruss heard carping (which the carpers called testimony), assigned fault, and assessed fines. Jamel’s allegation that had started the ruckus had concerned Team Four’s alleged snobbishness in “thinking it was Settlement One, better than anybody else,” or words to that effect. Settlement One had definitely been mentioned, and it wasn’t the first time this week that Harribon had heard those words under stressful circumstances. “Settlement One and its crazy Topman.” Jamel Soames was fond of that phrase.
By the time Harribon was finished with the last of the combatants, Jamel himself, with whom he had had some angry words—final ones as it turned out—he was late for his visit with his mother at the skilled care center. When, he entered her room, Elitia Kruss turned worried eyes from her bed.
“You’re late, Harri.” In her wasted face her eyes were huge but completely alert. She was having one of her increasingly rare good days. “What kept you?”
“Big fight, Momma. People throwing punches, throwing rocks, firing high-pressure water at one another. Lucky nobody got killed.” He sat down beside her and fanned himself with one flapping hand, indicating how hot things had been. “I finally told Jamel Soames to get out, leave. Leave the settlement, go somewhere else. He’ll probably take all five of the brothers with him, and maybe Dracun, too, but good riddance.” He shook his head, thinking of the relative inconvenience of keeping the Soameses versus recruiting replacements. Recruiting was no fun either.
“Dracun Soames will be furious,” she said, referring to Harribon’s assistant, sister to the belligerent brothers.
“She’ll have to be furious. It’s in my authority, Momma, and I’ve had enough.”
She shook her head sadly. “Such children,” she said. “Grown-up people acting like such children. And now you’re so late. You’ll miss your dinner at the brotherhouse. Slagney said he was cooking this week. You should run on while it’s still hot.”
“Nonsense!” he growled. “I’m going to have my visit with you. I can always heat my dinner up if it’s cold when I get there, but Slagney will probably keep it warm for me.
He sat down comfortably, making himself obviously ready for a protracted stay. Elitia Kruss was dying. She knew it and the family knew it. If her condition had been curable, the techs would have kept her in the medical facility at CM. She wasn’t curable, so they’d sent her home to die in the skilled care center of her own settlement, a center staffed only as needed by people who worked in the fields when there were no sick or dying to care for, but who had been trained to provide expert supportive care. Harribon reflected that no matter how much humankind learned about disease and hurt bodies, there was always something new coming along they didn’t know how to cure. They could grow hands and feet and even whole arms or legs. They could take out organs and put in new, cloned ones. They could inject rectified DNA into a person and change all his cells. But this thing, a strange, rare kind of half-cancer half-fungus, nothing worked on at all. Less than a hundred cases, Systemwide, and one of them had to be Momma. They didn’t even know how it was transmitted, or if it was transmitted, or whether it might be some genetic thing they hadn’t figured out yet. They called it the ghost disease, because they couldn’t find it. The gene manipulations that had cured a thousand other diseases did no good in this case. Fifty generations of science, and people still died before their allotted five score lifeyears.
They talked for quite a while, she continuing alert, and he being unwilling to waste a moment of it. When she fell asleep suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he left her and went home to the brotherhouse,
