Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

Her recovery was rapid. Almost too rapid, Marghe thought. It seemed as though there was a fountain, a hot spring of energy inside her fizzing and bubbling and demanding to be let out.

“I feel different,” she said to Thenike.

“You are different.”

“No, I feel…” she hunted for a way to describe the incredible well-being she felt,

“like I could live for a year on sunshine and fresh air, like I might never get sick again.”

Thenike laughed, and Marghe listened to that laugh: rich, smoky, warm, it rolled like the breaking waves on a flat beach, as if it could go on forever, changeless. “Oh, you will,” the viajera said, and Marghe heard music in her many-layered voice.

“You even sound different. And I can smell…” Everything. She could smell everything, and the scent was excitement: her own, Thenike’s. She watched Thenike’s dark brow tighten a little in the center, noticed for the first time how the lines were slightly asymmetrical, canting down toward her right eyebrow, like old timbers sagging at one end. Except it was not just sight and sound and smell, it was something else—a different kind of sensitivity that made Thenike’s voice almost visible, that sharpened Marghe’s sight so that what she saw seemed to have texture, more meaning than mere color or shape.

“It may be that the poisons fed to you as part of the vaccine are out of your system now, that the virus has cleaned you.”

Symbiosis, Marghe thought. Like allowing spiders to spin their webs in a house so that the flies and mosquitos were kept to a minimum. Like the E. coli that flourished in her gut and helped her digest proteins and process fibers, the result of some bacterial infection in a million-years-distant ancestor.

Outside, something sang, a long call that started out yellow, dipped in the middle to blue, then rose to scintillating gold and orange, as though the caller had decided that it was not, after all, sad. Marghe smiled. “What was that?”

“The chia bird. She’s been singing for two days now. A little early: today is only the first day of the Bird Moon.”

“What does she look like?”

“Come see for yourself.”

The chia, perched on top of the house, was like a palm-sized replica of the pictures of herd birds Marghe had studied at Port Central: bony crest, grayish, slippery-looking skin blushing to pink where the capillaries webbed the near surface, stringy pectorals that powered two true wings like those of a bat, and a fixed gliding wing like delicate parchment. When it turned to examine its observers, Marghe saw that its eyes were startling and green, like a cat’s.

The days got warmer, and Marghe moved back into the guest room. There was more sun, and she heard more chia birds calling and more wirrels chittering from the forest, There were insect noises and the soughing of wind in trees, though it was not the same as hearing wind in Earth trees; the leaves were stiffer, the sound higher pitched. Sometimes it hissed.

Marghe turned the soil in the garden and listened to the wind. So many sounds twined into that hissing: insect carapaces scraping the undersides of dead leaves, living leaves shivering in the wind, an empty nutshell rolling up against a tree trunk with a soft tck . It would be a long time before she grew tired of her newly virus-sharp senses.

As she worked, she thought about what Thenike had taught her, about deepsearching, about patterning, about pregnancy.

They were all part of the same process. She rooted out a weed and tossed it onto the pile she would use for compost. Deep-search. Something that all did, once they thought they were ready. Often some time around puberty, though earlier or later was not too unusual. The searcher looked within, to find out… what?

“Whatever she looks for,” Thenike had said unhelpfully. “Almost always a name.

Sometimes what she would like to do with her life.”

It intrigued Marghe. What did they see, and how did they see it? Like a movie, an interactive net holo, an abstract painting? Maybe it was audio, or tactile. Olfactory.

“All,” Thenike said, and added, just when Marghe was beginning to feel satisfied with that answer, “or none, or a mix.”

The more Marghe had pressed, the less clear the viajera’s answers had seemed.

“You’re not being clear,” she had said, frustrated. “How do you mean, exactly,

‘listen to what’s inside you’?”

“Try it for yourself,” Thenike had said. “Then you explain it to me.”

That had been yesterday. Marghe did not want to take the viajera up on her suggestion. She was afraid.

She pondered that as she dug and rooted. Now and again she moved one plant away from another, or closer to its neighbor. She was not sure why she did this, only that it was good for the different plants; it felt right. When the plants were wrongly ordered, it felt on some dim level as though someone were screeching metal down metal, setting her teeth on edge. When she moved the plants, the discomfort stopped. At first she had been disturbed by the fact that she was behaving without identifiable empiric reason, and had tried not to do so. But the feeling became unpleasant. Now she allowed herself to act automatically and tried not to worry about it.

She stood up and stretched, moved to the patch of garden she wanted to break in for the jaellum seedlings growing indoors in the nursery, just off the great room. The ground was hard, still frosty in places. She dug until she was damp with sweat inside her tunic.

She straightened her back. Something was not right. She sat quietly, letting her mind idle, and then she knew: the jaellum seedlings would do better over on the south side of the garden, in the more sandy soil. Which meant she had broken this ground for nothing. She swore softly. It would take hours to dig over a new patch, and she would have to transfer the goura bulbs she had planted earlier in the sandy patch.

Maybe she was wrong. It would be easier if she was wrong. She would continue breaking this ground. Yes. After all, she had no real reason, no good reason, to believe they would flourish better in a different location.

By gritting her teeth, she managed to work for about another half an hour, but eventually she had to stop; her discomfort was almost painful. She admitted defeat.

Whether or not she knew how she knew it, the seedlings would fare better in the sandy south garden. All she was doing was wasting time and energy. What needed doing needed doing.

She sighed, climbed to her feet, and took her taar-skin mat and roll of wet felt over to the goura. She starting digging up the shoots, one by one, and laying them carefully on the unrolled felt. Next time she would listen more attentively to her instincts.

She paused, trowel in hand. What needed doing needed doing .

Deepsearch. If Marghe was honest, she herself knew she ought to do it. Ignoring the need did not make it go away.

She thrust her trowel deep into the soil and took her hand away. The handle gleamed, rounded and polished by a hundred human hands. She wondered how old it was, whether a woman of Ollfoss using the trowel could look inside her past and see her mother or grandmother or many-times-great-grandmother handling the same trowel, bending over the same patch of dirt. The thought terrified her, but what scared her more was the idea that she might look inside herself and find nothing.

Eight women pattern-sang for Marghe; she made the ninth. When she had asked Thenike why always nine, Thenike shrugged. “Nine is the right number.”

Marghe decided not to take that any further. “How long does it take?”

“A few moments, or the whole day. Everyone’s different. It depends how far you go, and how easy it is. Many of the young ones are frightened, which makes it harder. You’ll go in fast, I think. How long you stay is up to you.”