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Is their new life really better than it would have been on Earth?

 

by Sue Burke

Nicoletta knew her mother would die soon. Many adults had gotten cancer from radiation during the long space flight. Her mother had recently developed a lump in her neck and had trouble breathing.

But she still liked to talk, and as Nicoletta prepared the oven to cook yams that Bryan had brought in from the fields, her mother said, “Would you like to hear a story? There’s a story I always loved when I was a little girl. It’s called Cinderella. Okay? Once upon a time there was a girl, well, really a young woman, not a girl.”

“What are you telling her that useless crap for?” Bryan said.

Nicoletta looked up. This was one of her last chances to hear her mother say anything, and now Bryan was going to ruin it. Why couldn’t he be the one dying? He was always complaining anyway. Besides, the yams he brought were very dirty, so it would be hard work to clean them, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of yams, so some people might not get enough to eat – again. But she didn’t say any of this because it wouldn’t be nice.

Her mother had no such concerns. “It’s just a fairy tale! Kids ought to know something about Earth culture. It wasn’t all bad.”

“What will she learn from Cinderella? Fairy godmothers and princes? What good is that here?”

Nicoletta spread out the embers in the bottom of the oven and added a little more wood, careful not to burn herself. Although she was young, she knew how to make fires burn hotter, or brighter, or slow enough to last all night: useful skills, and she liked to be useful.

“These are ancient stories with important lessons,” her mother said.

“Like glass slippers? Glass!”

“You don’t know the whole story. Nicky, maybe you should take those yams outside to brush the dirt off there. Bryan, help her. The bag’s too heavy for her to move. Daniel will be coming soon with water to wash them.”

As she worked outside the kitchen hut, she listened to them argue inside. Words like “archetype” and “Disney” meant nothing to her, but she knew what glass was: there were glass jars and things in the medical clinic. Her mother very much wanted to tell the story, and what she said made Nicoletta want to hear it all the more. It had important lessons, glass slippers, and fairies, whatever they were.

She fumed about Bryan while she rubbed sandy soil off the yams with a rag – only twenty-nine yams, but there were forty-one people in the colony. And some of the yams were small. Children got preference at mealtimes, but that didn’t always mean they got enough, and it hurt to see anyone go hungry. Adults were so skinny.

Daniel arrived carrying a big bucket of water. He set it down and pointed. “My papa caught a fish.”

She looked at it. “Mom, he has a fish! It’s a two-tail!” It wasn’t especially big, but two-tails tasted good.

A little later, she was carrying the fish guts to a garbage pit next to some fruit vines to fertilize them, and Daniel had come with her. He was older and smart, so she asked, “What’s Cinderella?”

“Hmm. Don’t know.”

“It’s a story from Earth. About fairy things. What are they?” She prepared to dump the pail into the pit.

“Hey, don’t. Let me do that. There’s a lot of corals around the pit. See? They could sting.” He took the pail and tossed the contents from a safe distance. The corals, little hard-shelled animals that lived on the ground, snapped their tentacles at the tiny lizards who were disturbed by the splash and darted around.

She leaned over to see if any got caught. It always surprised her that a tentacle so small it would merely sting her could immobilize a lizard – and there, a brown one smaller than her finger arched its back, shuddered, and gave a final hoot. Poor thing. But it would be a good meal for a coral. What would it be like to eat a lizard? One big enough to eat, of course…

“Fairy,” Daniel repeated.

“Oh. Right. Mom said fairy tale, fairy godmother.”

“And these are thing from Earth? Hmm. Is fairy bad?”

“Mom said she loved the story when she was little.”

“Stories work best when there’s something bad in them. Those are villains. I’m studying about them in my school lessons about literature. “ He added: “The stories are hard to make sense of because you have to know a lot about Earth.”

“I want to know more.”

“Did you know there were lots and lots of people on Earth? Billions, sometimes!”

“Billions!” She giggled.

“That number’s so big, it’s more than all the trees in the forest. You could never even know everyone’s name.”

She tried to imagine it and failed. “I know that Earth had lots of water, just like here.”

They often exchanged tidbits of knowledge about Earth, a place they knew they would never see, since their parents’ expedition had been one-way and they didn’t have the technology to go back even if they wanted to. Nor was Earth likely to send any ships to visit, since space trips took so long they required hibernation. Perhaps Earth didn’t even remember the expedition, and of course it wouldn’t know that many people hadn’t arrived safely, but the survivors had managed to set up a small colony.

Dinner offered more food than Nicoletta had expected. The meal was held, as always when the weather permitted, in the plaza in the middle of their village rather than in their little family huts. They ate at rough tables under what used to be solar panels when they had worked, but now they were merely a sort of roof that kept the whistling bats from swooping down to snatch some food. There was an entire small yam for her, a morsel of fish, a leaf of lettuce, broth from the bones and scraps of yesterday’s roast, and a piece of fruit from the vines. She – everyone – would have enough to eat that day.

It confirmed her faith in the adults. Problems made her worry, but adults tried solve them, and they knew what they were doing. They had studied and prepared very hard before they had left Earth to colonize a distant planet.

But food wasn’t all she wanted. As soon as everyone sat down and began eating, she said, “Mom, can you tell me Cinderella now?” Bryan was sitting pretty far away. Maybe he wouldn’t even hear.

Wendy, an adult who was sitting across the table, laughed happily. “Fairy tales. Oh, that would be fun!”

“The kids won’t understand,” said another adult. “They don’t have enough points of reference.”

“And they’ll learn wrong things,” Vera said. “It’s all about stratified social classes, wish fulfillment –.”

“But also the joy of imagination. These are symbolic stories.”

“Besides,” her mother said, “this would be the Charles Perrault version, not the Disney one. It has a moral.”

“And princes and fairies and pumpkins turning into coaches. Fantasy,” another adult said sarcastically.

“Glass slippers!” Bryan added.

Nicoletta listened with awe. All the adults knew the story! It must be important, since they had so many opinions about it.

“It’s not fantasy,” her mother said. “It’s mythical. Basic motifs and instinctual wisdom.”

“But it’s not our myth anymore,” Vera said. “Not this planet. We left to escape oppression, which Cinderella didn’t overcome. She didn’t even oppose it. She merely came out on top, and through magic! She bought into the system.”

“Please, can we hear the story?” Nicoletta said. Everyone looked at her. Adults didn’t like to be interrupted.

Wendy said, “They need to know about Earth, about why exactly we left.”

“There’s things they don’t need to know,” Bryan said.

After more debate, Paula, the leader, said they should vote, and by a slim margin, the pro-Cinderella side won. But it would be a bedtime story. The children would have to wait. And they had to promise to work hard that afternoon in school.

As the sun dropped near the horizon, the air grew cool, glowworms and fireflies sparkled in the fields, and lizards and crabs in the trees began to hoot and buzz. Eight children assembled under the solar panels – the rest, like Sylvia, were too young, and two weren’t allowed to come by their parents. Nicoletta sat in front, entranced both by the idea of hearing the mythical story and by the joy of seeing her mother in what might be her last distinguished moment.

“Once upon a time –”

“What does that mean?”

“That means it happened a long time ago, but we don’t know when. Once upon a time there was a girl who was very good and very beautiful, but her mother died, and her father married again. He married a woman who was nasty and who had two nasty daughters…”

It turned out to be a long story, so long that they had to go straight to bed afterwards rather than discuss it. For Nicoletta every moment was magic – that is, it was different from reality, impossible in fact, and very exciting. Lizards became people, vegetables became little houses on wheels, and there were balls, which were special parties where people ate all they wanted and danced. And although Cinderella had a hard life, in the end, because she was always kind and good, she lived happily ever after – for the rest of her life – and she got everything she wanted, including a prince, who was really an ordinary man who got preferential treatment, but he must have been especially nice because everyone liked him.

The stuff of sweet dreams.

Imagine being Cinderella. That was what all the girls were doing the next morning. They did their chores with moments of magic.

“Look! This is my dress for the ball!” Rosemary had stuck flowers all over her clothes.

“I have glass slippers!” Cynthia was trying to walk with scraps of crab shell on her feet.

“We’ll make the lizards be people and do our work,” Leon said, holding a red lizard by the tail, which was stupid because it could twist back to give a venomous bite. You had to hold it right behind the head. He dropped it as soon as it moved to attack.

Nicoletta rubbed ashes on her hands and face and recognized that her clothes were already the coarse rags that Cinderella wore. She worked hard, picked some more flowers for Rosemary to wear, and imagined glass slippers. Bryan was wrong. Glass would make good shoes. It would keep out water and mud when it rained.

As the children fetched water and wood, picked weeds in the lettuce patch, and hung up laundry, they imagined magical houses made out of cactuses instead of pumpkins, which apparently were also hollow vegetables. Other children joked about having houses with prickers, but Nicoletta thought they would probably be warm and dry in winter, which would be a magical improvement.

That afternoon, they looked up dances on one of the last working computers. Daniel’s mom said that they probably waltzed at a ball and taught them the dance, then used counting one-two-three as a math lesson.

It was all very exciting, but not quite right. Nicoletta didn’t know why, and that evening, after supper, when some children were practicing the waltz, she talked to Daniel.

“Did you like the story?” she asked.

“I didn’t learn much about Earth. I knew that most of that stuff. I mean, there are lizards on Earth, but they’re not like the lizards here. Mice are sort of like tiny gray fippokats. And some people had a lot more stuff than other people, which wasn’t fair. All the adults will tell you that. That was one of the worst things about Earth.”

“You didn’t like it? My mom loves it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll ask her.”

She got up, and, as she walked across the little plaza toward where her mother was sitting, she overheard some adults talking about the end of the wheat stores until the harvest. No more bread. That disappointed her, but she would be good and not complain.

Her mother looked weak, but she smiled when she saw Nicoletta, who felt very pleased that she could make her mother smile just by being there. She resolved to spend as much time with her mother as she could. She snuggled close to her on the bench and asked, “Why do you like the Cinderella fairy tale?”

“Wow. Why do I like it? Well, I like the way it talks about hope. Cinderella had a hard life, but in the end she got what she deserved.”

“Sure, but it took magic,” Vera said. “Cinderella couldn’t count on human justice.”

Her mother thought a moment, then nodded. “That’s right. There wasn’t a lot of justice on Earth. That’s one of the reasons we left, Nicky. Earth had a lot of problems that no one could solve, so we wanted to make a new start on a new planet and do things right. It’s very hard work, but we think the struggle will be worth it. We’ll make this place better than Earth.”

“What problems?” Nicoletta still felt very curious about Earth.

Vera answered. “Repeated pandemics, environmental degradation, business oligarchies, religious extremism, massive starvation and climate change refugee displacement, and thermonuclear showdowns.”

Nicoletta didn’t know what the words meant, but they were big and ominous.

“What you need to know,” her mother said, “is that a lot of people worked very hard to send us off to found a colony far away so we could try again. Remember how in the story, there were bad people, but there were good people, too? How Cinderella was kind even to her sisters who were mean to her, and how she tried to do everything her fairy godmother said? We used technology like magic to go to a new place so we could do something wonderful here.”

Nicoletta had heard the story about the founding of the colony again and again, but each time the details became a little clearer. Earth had big, complicated problems that couldn’t be solved, but the colony faced simple, solvable problems. Earth had bad people, like the step-sisters, who were cruel and told lies, but they had been left behind. Good people were like Cinderella, who was nice to everyone and worked hard and did what she was told.

The story wasn’t about fancy dresses or dancing or turning lizards into workers. It was about people and what they should do.

“Let’s do your hair up in ringlets,” Mom said. “A fancy hairdo for a ball.”

“But the story isn’t about fancy hair.”

“Well, it’s about fancy things, too. They’re fun, and it’s good to have fun.”

So Mom twirled her curly hair into long spirals, then declared, “Look, aren’t you beautiful? Just like a princess. Here,” and she took off her shawl and a string of beads. “Here’s a long fancy skirt, and jewelry.”

Nicoletta looked at her reflection in a piece of shiny metal, and indeed she looked special. Her mother was right. It was fun. She giggled and twirled like she was at a ball. Who was her prince? Daniel, of course, and she got him to dance with her. When they grew up, they would get married and live happily ever after.

But the next day, it was back to work. The rains always stopped in autumn and plants got dry, including the plants that floated in the air with hydrogen bubbles in them. They would blow around high in the sky until static electricity made them spark and burn, showering embers and seeds. Children and adults were posted around the wheat fields to watch for fires.

They had to watch for animals, too, which were trying to eat as much as they could before winter. Adults argued about whether they should harvest early, before things were fully ripe, just to be sure of the harvest. One night, a pack of animals with huge claws came to dig up the yam field. The children had to stay indoors while the adults used weapons and torches to chase them away, but much was lost. The adults had acted too late.

A few days later, she hurried through her task to help gather onions so she could spend time with her mother, who was resting in their hut. But before she entered, she overheard a conversation inside with the medics. “Let’s just let it run its course,” her mother said, and her voice sounded hoarse. “Save the medicine for someone who might actually recover. I don’t have much time left either way.”

Nicoletta felt love for her mother as never before, proud of her generosity, acting like Cinderella, but she was also heartbroken to think that not much time was left. And worried because so many adults were sick. What would happen when they were all gone?

Days passed quickly. Occasionally, during afternoon classes, they learned more about Earth. The sheer size and variety of Earthly achievements staggered and amazed her, even though some things repulsed her. One day she looked up the word “stirvation” – no, “starvation” – in a dictionary, and the word “refugee.” Starvation meant hunger. Refugees were people forced to leave their homes to escape something.

This left her with questions, but by then her mother had gotten a tracheotomy and communicated with difficulty, so Nicoletta didn’t know who to talk to. Those kinds of questions would make some adults like Bryan angry. Wendy said she would become her new mother, and she probably could ask her those questions, but it would be better to wait and see. Maybe parents didn’t even have all the answers anyway. Sometimes, she had noticed, they made mistakes. Even when things went right, they often didn’t go well. Life did not seem to improve, and the future did not look good.

One afternoon, the biggest wheat field caught fire. Everyone ran to put it out, but the wind spread it too fast for them.

“The wheat was green,” Bryan said as the field still smoldered. “Not all the grains burned. We can still gather some up, but we better hurry because every kind of vermin will be trying get some, too.”

Nicoletta and many people worked until sunset, then got up early and, as soon as it was light enough, they continued to pick through the ashes, looking for grains that had been only toasted or partially burned. Others harvested the remaining wheat early, although they knew it would be less nutritious and taste bad.

As she sifted through the stinking ashes, her blackened fingers scratched and stinging, she thought about making mistakes, big mistakes about big things, so big she could not quite grasp them. She thought about constant hunger. And about how winter would be long and cold. She wanted to ask her mother, “Is this really better than Earth?” but her mother was much too sick, and most of all, that question would make her immeasurably sad.

By then, almost everyone had forgotten the story about Cinderella and no one ever told it again, but Nicoletta would long remember thinking, “Is this really better than Earth?” She would remember because she realized even then that she knew the answer, and that nothing in her life was going to magically change no matter what she did.

 

When Roland was a boy, his father took him out for a walk. This story was previously published in Asimov’s magazine and Year’s Best SF 14.

 

by Sue Burke

Just before we went into the forest, I found the sort of thing I wanted to show my son.

“Roland, look, there’s a leaf lizard nest that just hatched. They look just like little leaves of grass, don’t they?”

Springtime. Everything was coming to life again. And just beyond arm’s reach, I saw what looked like a dried-up fern but probably wasn’t. I kept an eye on it as my boy and I squatted and studied the ground. The lizards were hard to spot at first, but finally he giggled and pointed.

“They’re very little, Daddy.”

“They’ll grow. But now they’re so little that they can’t hurt you. You can let one walk on your hand.”

And so we did, green whips with legs, just half the length of a five-year-old’s finger. I told him how they hide in the grass, head down, waiting for even littler animals to come past, then they jump down and eat them. That was why if we let our hands hang down, the lizards would climb down to the tips of our fingers. Their natural place to be.

That supposed dead fern next to us had a crown of eyes. Sure enough, it was a mountain spider. Second one I’d seen already our little walk. Why so many this spring? Like a lot of things, they had an Earth name because they were sort of like the Earth creature. From what I gathered, spiders on Earth were never bigger than your hand, but ours were bigger than your head. Both had multiple legs and a poisonous bite. Were ours as aggressive as Earth spiders, which often bit people? Were Earth spiders as smart as ours?

“Let’s put the lizards down so they can get about their lives.” I set my hand on the ground and, with a little encouragement, the lizard climbed off. Roland copied me, and we watched them disappear into the grass.

Then he turned to me, eyes worried. “Do we step on them and we don’t know?”

Good question. Maybe he would grow up to feel like I do about the forest.

“I suppose sometimes. We’re big, so we can’t help making mistakes. I think we should never try to hurt things if we don’t have to. I hunt, you know, but I never kill anything except to eat or to protect us.” But I didn’t want to lecture. “Let’s go into the woods now, okay?”

I didn’t point out the spider. His mother would kill me – or make me wish she would, just kill me and stop yelling – if she knew how close we were to spiders. Not only the one next to the path, but all over. Lots at the riverbank, but everyone knew that because they stole fish. They were in the woods. In the farm fields and orchards. I’d even seen one in the city, and I shooed it out. Most people didn’t notice. If you don’t look hard, you don’t see things.

And if you don’t take advantage of your chances, you lose them. I get time with Roland most days, but never enough. Spring only comes once a year, and a boy is five only once in a lifetime. So off we went. I’d just have to be extra careful.

“Are we going hunting?”

“No. I mean, I thought I’d show you things. There’s a lot to see.”

“Deer crab?”

“Oh, sure. And birds and insects and kats all sorts of things. Listen. Hear that?”

“Pii, pii,” he repeated.

“Exactly. That’s a turnstone lizard.”

“More lizards! I can’t remember so many lizards.”

I spotted it near a stump. “I know, it’s hard. There’s lots and lots of kinds. Shh. See it? It’s black and white and brown with big stripes.”

I knelt and helped him spot it.

“Wow. It’s a jewel lizard,” he said.

“Not quite. You wouldn’t want it in your garden. It digs things up. Do you see what’s next to it? That dead bush? It’s getting closer and closer. . .”

The bush, of course, was a stick-feather bird. It suddenly grabbed the lizard, bashed its head against the stump, and began to tear off legs to swallow. Roland jumped to his feet.

“Animals hide in the woods,” he said. “Eagles sometimes. Mommy says the woods are dangerous. That’s why I can’t go there alone.”

Mommy says – of course she does.

“We make sure the eagles stay away,” I said. “There are things to watch out for, but mostly the things that hide want to hide from us, not to get us.” Mostly. I didn’t want him scared, so I’d have to find something non-scary fast. “Let’s keep going.”

He seeming relieved to get away from the bird. We walked a little, then I had an idea. “Can you think of other things that hide?”

“Hide?” He looked around.

“How about kats?” I suggested. “Why is their fur green?”

“Um, they’re green so they can pretend they’re grass lizards. A whole lot of them.” He laughed. A joke, apparently. So I laughed too.

Then I saw a good example.

“How about that, there on the tree trunk? That’s lizard poop for sure, right?”

“No, Daddy. It’s not.” He had me figured out.

“Right.” I reached out and nudged it. It flew away.

He shrieked with delight. “A poop bug!”

“A blue firefly, actually.”

“That’s a firefly? They’re so pretty. Everybody likes to watch them.”

“Their light is pretty. But when they land, they look like poop so that birds and lizards don’t eat them. Most people don’t know that. They just look at the lights that fly around at night and don’t find out about what’s making the light. But now you know.” Our eyes met, sharing a secret.

Just above us on the tree, I realized, there was a spider close enough to reach out and touch my shoulder.

“Let’s keep going and see what else we can find.”

“What if kat poop is really little bugs? I mean, little bugs that looked like kat poop?”

“You really like kats, don’t you?” The city kept a colony of pet kats. “What do you like about them?”

He began to tell me about the dance he and the other children were learning with the kats, and demonstrated the steps. I tried to pay attention, but I kept thinking about the spiders.

Far too many of them. They usually lived in the mountains just below the tree line, rarely in our woods. Maybe they’d had a population explosion. Maybe the weather, cool and dry for springtime, made them feel comfortable lower down. Maybe our colony attracted them. Or maybe something was pushing them down, like predators or hunger.

I spotted something Roland needed to know about, and I hoped it wouldn’t scare him. I’d try to make it sound good.

“I’ll show you something else that’s not what it seems like. See those flowers? Those are irises. See how they sparkle? Very pretty. But don’t touch them. They have tiny pieces of glass on them, and they’ll cut you. Do you know why? Because they like blood. It’s good fertilizer. Now don’t be scared. Just know what they are and don’t touch.”

“They’re very sparkly.”

“Yes, they are.” Not far away, a spider sat in a tree over a patch of moss that was really a kat, flattened to the ground, hiding in plain sight. I took a step to lead Roland away before the spider figured it out, but the boy wouldn’t move.

“They’re like jewel lizards,” he said. “The flowers look like red lizards and yellow lizards.”

“You’re right. I never noticed that, but they do look just like lizards.”

“Maybe the flowers catch things that think they’re going to catch lizards.”

“I bet that’s it. Pretty smart to see that.” Why hadn’t I before? I complain that people don’t look, and I don’t look myself sometimes.

“They can’t catch me,” Roland said, “because I’m smarter than they are!”

“Exactly. Let’s go. You know, when we have our hunters’ meeting, you should come and tell us about that, about the flowers. We’re always trying to figure things out. Well, that’s something that you figured out about irises.”

“Me? I can talk at the hunters’ meeting? Really, Daddy?”

“Yes, you can. The discoverer gets the honors.” I’d watch him talk and feel proud of my boy.

We were desperate to know more about the spiders. Their venom could kill a kat or other fair-sized animal. No one knew what it could do to a human and no one volunteered to find out. They never attacked us, either, though if you got too close to a nest, they’d gibber and wave their legs and snap their jaws to drive you away. They’d steal, too. Fishing crews had to watch out. They moved too fast for us to catch them and dodged arrows like it was a game. In fact, they had figured out the range of our arrows and knew to stay just beyond it.

We often met and talked about spiders, everyone together: hunters, farmers, fishers, even the kitchen crew, because our kitchen garbage might attract them so it couldn’t be dumped just anywhere. We never could dump it anywhere, actually, but spiders had people scared. Tiffany, for example, Roland’s mother, who for one brief time made herself seem like the perfect woman for me – but that’s another story – was preaching extermination. I worried that if we started a fight, the spiders might keep it going. As the lead hunter, I needed to offer a plan of my own.

Honestly, I didn’t know enough about spiders to know what to do.

“What’s that?” Roland said, grabbing my leg and hiding behind it. Something was crashing through the underbrush toward us. I knew right away.

“Over there?” It was moving fast and barking loud.

“It’s big, Daddy.”

I picked him up. “No, it actually isn’t, and it won’t hurt us. It’s just birds, a lot of them. Bluebirds. See?” He hung on tight but leaned to get a better look. “Bluebirds. Hear them bark? There’s lots of barks, so you know it’s not one big animal, it’s a lot of little animals. They like to run around and make a lot of noise so they can scare up things to eat. All in a line, zig-zag. Look, they’re stopping. Maybe they found something. Let’s see what.”

I walked toward them slowly. “Usually they let you get close. When you get too close, they tell you.” I was almost five steps away when the alpha bird turned, barked at me and glared. I took a step back. It went back to eating.

“That’s as close as we can get. They don’t want trouble, so they warn you. They don’t attack if they don’t have to. What do you think they’re eating?”

He leaned out bravely. I leaned with him. The bird turned and barked, casually, just a reminder. I knew what they were eating from the way they were arranged around it, but I waited for Roland.

“It’s purple! Is it a slug?”

“Yes, they like to eat slugs. That’s why you should never hurt a bluebird reef. We want them to live around us, so we respect their homes.”

Slugs. Chunks of mobile slime that dissolve flesh. If there was something to exterminate, those would be it. But we could never get them all.

Where there’s one, there’s more. I heard a sudden hum too close to the left . . . something moved fast. I stepped back. It was a spider wrestling a slug, brown legs wrapped around a purple glob. A brief squirm, then the fight was over. The spider picked it up with four legs and hurried away on the other four, not as fast or graceful as usual but gibbering in a way that I swear sounded proud.

So they caught slugs, and were happy to do it. Efficient, too. News to me, and worth knowing. Just a few animals could do that. Maybe a chemical protected them, or extra-tough skin. It would be more than handy to have another slug-eating animal around. Especially if they turned out to be no more scary than bluebirds. But would Tiffany believe that?

Roland was still watching the birds. Good. The spider fighting the slug might have scared him, and his mother wanted him scared of the forest. I did not. Yet another difference between her and me. She liked safe things, and I liked living things.

Every night I dreamed of the forest, and every day I woke eager to go there. Not everyone did, of course. They liked making things with their hands or coaxing crops to grow. They were satisfied, and who could blame them? But the forest – you’re there, but you don’t make it and you can’t coax it. It’s not even an it. It’s a you, I mean, the forest is alive and does things, reacts, watches, even attacks. Full of tricks and beauty. I hoped I’d showed some of that to Roland. But he was getting fidgety in my arms.

“Time to go home?”

“Okay, Daddy.”

Something in his voice troubled me, and I tried to figure it out as I headed down a trail that led out of the woods. He seemed unhappy. With me? With the forest? Was he bored? Or worse, scared? Good thing I hadn’t pointed out the spiders. Who knows what Tiffany had told him?

We kept talking on our way out. He asked “What’s that?” “What’s that?” about trees, lizard hoots, but more like a game than curiosity. A couple of times I saw him looking in one direction while he asked about something the other way. Young children had short attention spans. We probably had been there too long.

I set him down when we reached the fields, and he pointed at a lentil tree, its purple leaves contrasting with the greening fields around it.

“Mommy says you have to grow them far apart so if one gets scorpions, they doesn’t get all the trees,” he said.

I knew that, but didn’t want to disappoint him. “Is that why? So there’s a tree here, and there, and way over there.”

“And you have to prune them. Every spring.”

“Carefully, I bet.”

“Very carefully. And you can’t plant snow vines next to each other. They fight.”

“Like this?” I raised my fists.

“No. With roots and, um, with just their roots. It’s very challenging to maintain an orchard.”

Those were Tiffany’s words exactly, right down to her intonation. Of course, she spent more time with the boy, so she had a bigger influence, and maybe he’d grow up to tend orchards or crops instead of hunt in the forest. Perfectly acceptable.

The city rose across the fields, surrounded by a brick wall. Two hundred people. After four generations, we finally had enough to eat, even a surplus. We had domesticated several plants and animals, and were still learning about others. Every year we discovered new surprises about the planet. And every kind of work was needed. Maybe Roland would become a carpenter, a medic, or a cook. All perfectly respectable.

“You know,” he said, “we don’t hide. I wonder what animals think? They see us and we don’t care if they do.” He sounded like a little adult. Who was he copying now? “They think we aren’t scared. If we’re not scared of them, should they be scared of us?”

“That’s a good question.”

“That’s a good question,” he repeated.

Well, maybe I had helped him see that the world could be bigger than you are, and that was okay. Even if you didn’t understand everything in it.

“We have to take care of our trees,” Roland said, sounding like himself again. “If they’re really happy, maybe they can dance.” He looked up. “Are trees happy in the forest?”

“I think so. That’s where they live. Did you like the forest?”

He spent a long moment thinking. “Yes. I saw lots of things.” He looked up with a sly smile. “Daddy, you didn’t see. There were spiders everywhere, and they were looking at us.”