The table was a bit too small for so many people, but Zana was grateful that she was sandwiched between Galen and Polar, otherwise she'd probably have dropped into her plate from exhaustion. Despite Yantes' cries of pity at the sight of her sore feet, the farmer's wife had immediately taken her up on her offer to help her with the household chores, and had kept her busy for the better part of the afternoon. Zana hadn't dared to mention her aching feet again; she wanted Yantes to think of her as a useful addition, not a burden.
She let the conversation around the table wash over her as she listlessly stabbed at her food. Yantes was still bustling between table and oven; her energy seemed to be inexhaustible.
"So, your Alan suggested a new kind of pump..."
"Have you looked at my new fence, pa?"
"... said he'd show me tomorrow what he meant by lifting the water with a screw..."
"It's a new fence that the cow can't trample down, and..."
"He's got some strange ideas, your human, but I'm willing to try some of them, if they're not too outlandish..."
"... and Donny said if you want the fence somewhere else, you can put it apart and then put it together again..."
"Who?"
"I named him Donny, like the human in the story." Remo shoved a huge salad leaf into his mouth, at once pleased and unnerved to be in the center of attention all of a sudden.
"The name was Donez," Anto muttered behind his cup.
"I like Donny better," Remo said stubbornly. "He's my human, so I call him what I want."
"He's Yuma's human," his father rumbled, "he's just letting us use them for a while."
"What did... Donny say to his new name?" Zana asked.
Remo shrugged. "Nothing. I've just decided on it."
Zana speared a tomato. "Well, I hope to be there when he hears it."
Remo frowned when Galen began to chuckle, but shrugged off his momentary confusion and turned to his father. "Have you looked at my fence?"
"Not yet, you can show it to me after dinner." Polar ruffled his head and returned his attention to Galen.
"How did you get that idea for your new fence, Remo?" Zana wanted to know.
Remo squirmed in his seat; he had boasted with "his" new fence, but faced with a direct question, he didn't have the nerve to uphold that claim.
"It was Donny's idea," he mumbled. "But I made sure that he didn't laze around!"
"So both your humans know a lot about farming," Polar remarked mildly. "Funny thing, for humans living in the city..."
"They, ah, they must've learned it from their former master," Galen shrugged. Contrary to Remo, they were getting pretty good at lying, Zana thought dryly. "They never brought it up, but of course they never had a reason to, in the city."
"Yes, Donny said he learned it from an ape named Lincoln," Remo remembered.
"Well, I'd like to have a word or two with that ape," Polar said wistfully. "He seems to know a good deal about farming. And your Alan is a fine worker - the first wall is almost done. Tomorrow, we'll build the second one, further uphill. Alan said the fields will retain the water better during a dry spell." He emptied his cup and Yantes rose to fill it again.
"I hope to double the crop on that field. Who knows? Perhaps even triple it. We'll try some sweet corn, like Alan suggested..."
Anto banged his fork on the table with a loud exhale. "He's a human! What makes him think he can tell you how to manage our farm? And how can you listen to him? It's ridiculous!"
"Because I saw it work!" Polar leaned over the table and pointed at his face. "And you saw it, too!"
Anto snorted and raised his hands in denial. "I saw nothing! The human was scratching in the mud like a pig, that's what I saw!"
Polar shook his head. "Oh Anto, you need to get your head outta your arse once in a while."
"It's your farm, and you keep it like you want," Anto growled. "Once I have my own farm, I'll decide how things are done there."
"That's right, Anto, once you have your own farm, you'll be the head of the house there," Polar nodded. "Jus' as well that you remember who it is here."
An uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Zana glanced at Remo, who kept his head down so as not to draw anyone's attention. Yantes was stirring the pot on the oven maybe a bit longer than necessary.
The farmer cleared his throat. "Eh, the human told a funny story today. Claimed he learned how to clear a field when he was a boy... on his father's farm. Can you imagine that?" He laughed. "Wanted to tell me that his father owned a farm! I asked him if he'd been adopted by an ape." He slapped his knee, roaring with laughter. Remo laughed with him. Galen chuckled a bit, too, although it sounded forced to Zana.
Alan gave you valuable advice, and all you give him in return is scorn.
She slipped out of her seat with a murmured excuse and vanished into the kitchen; a moment later, Yantes joined her, carrying a still half-full jug of lemonade in the crook of her arm. Zana ignored her; she stared out of the window, at the barn across the yard. She wondered what Alan and Peet were doing there now. Had they been given something to eat? Were they very tired? Had they been beaten, or even just slapped, shoved... treated with contempt?
Yantes filled up the jug and put it down beside her. "Don't you mind the men," she said soothingly. "They talk rough, but they're not treating your humans wrong. They're well fed, and they have a roof over their heads. And Polar is a good man - he doesn't whip the ox if he doesn't have to, and he won't beat your humans, either."
Zana sighed. It was no use talking with Yantes about Polar's attitude towards humans. They needed to be good guests; challenging what their hosts knew as common wisdom was out of the question.
But it was hard; she had never been one for platitudes. "I know; it's just - I miss them, somehow..." It sounded ridiculous even to her own ears.
But Yantes nodded sagely. "Ah, that's because in the city, it's easy to forget how the world is set up. That humans aren't pets, or family. They're beasts of burden, in the best case, and they're most happy when they're used like the Mothers intended it. You don't do them any favours by keeping them in unnatural conditions."
So she had unintentionally confirmed one of Yantes' prejudices. Apparently I'm quite a natural when it comes to conning people. Zana hastily grabbed for the opportunity to change the subject. "That sounds as if you've lived in the city, Yantes."
Yantes bobbed her head and laughed. "A short while, until I met Polar. I was training to be a nurse, but then this handsome man came along and..." she spread her arms, "the rest is history."
Zana smiled at her. "Do you ever miss it? Wish you could go back and... take a different turn?"
"No," Yantes said firmly. "We can't know what's around the bend in the road before we get there, Mila, and it's foolishness to look back and pretend we could've known then what we know now. That's a sure recipe for misery. We can only decide as best as we can, and be at peace with that. - And what are you doing there, young man?"
Remo jerked back from the kitchen cabinet that had partly hidden his small figure. "I didn't teach you to lurk in corners and eavesdrop on the grownups," Yantes chided him.
"I didn't lurk, I was thirsty!" Remo declared and dared to snatch the jug from the corner. "I was wondering what kept you so long!" He quickly retreated, and after a last pat on Zana's arm, Yantes followed him; there still were hungry men to be fed.
Zana turned back to the window and stared into the darkening yard.
A light breeze rustled the leaves over Galen's head, making the little white bell-shaped flowers dangle wildly at their stems. The young ape was oblivious to their beauty, cursing under his breath as he clamped down on his notes that threatened to flutter away like half-fledged birds.
"What are you scribbling there, Ga- dear? Preparing a lecture?" Zana teased and handed him a sheet that had gotten away. Galen saluted her with it and flashed her a grateful smile as he tucked it between the rest of his notes.
"Ah, no," he sighed, "although I'd love to use the auditorium for that one. Ha!" He laid the book on top of his notes to prevent them from taking off again, and expectantly patted the seat beside him, but Zana shook her head.
"I just wanted to check on how you're doing, Yuma." She was on her way to either clear the kitchen garden of weeds, or to grind corn; Yantes hadn't decided yet. Zana secretly hoped she'd get to do the garden. In any event, her taskmaster could turn the corner any moment, so she better keep their assumed names straight.
"Oh, I'm, I can't complain." Galen gestured around him. "I have... a nice chair for my foot, lemonade, fine weather..." He shrugged. "And a fascinating book to read. It's like a holiday, except for my bad conscience."
Zana ignored that last remark and craned her head to read his notes. "So what are you taking notes for?"
"It's just, uh, I'm sort of underlining passages that I find striking one way or the other - arguing with the text, in a way, since I have no one to bounce ideas off of." He smoothed the notes with his palm, a nervous gesture he couldn't suppress.
Zana frowned. "No one? I went to university, too, in case you'd forgotten." She had to remind herself, too, with all the mindless work she was currently forced to do.
"No, no, of course I haven't forgotten." Galen's nose twitched with distress. "But you're busy all day - what have you been doing just now?"
"I was drying the dishes, and now Yantes and I will grind corn." With her luck, it probably wouldn't be the weeds.
"She's not giving you a break, is she?" Galen asked with a rueful smile.
Zana shrugged. "It's not as if she has a break all day, either. And it's nothing, really, compared to what Alan and Peet have to shoulder. They are really being worked like Polar's ox."
"Polar seems to be quite happy with them."
"He's pretty excited with Alan's ideas - if he had the money, he'd been badgering you day and night by now to sell him." Zana finally gave in to the temptation to rest her feet for a moment, although she couldn't relax; her break would only last a short moment.
"From what he told us over dinner, Alan really knows a great deal about farming," Galen offered.
"It's so unfair!" Zana slapped her fist on her knee. "Polar isn't stupid - he understood those new inventions at once. Can you imagine how he could manage his farm if he'd gotten the opportunity to study agriculture at university?"
"They don't have such a course at university," Galen pointed out.
"Exactly, and why? Because they don't think it's worth wasting resources on it! Such arrogance!"
Galen was spared another of her rants, as Yantes stuck her head around the corner in that moment. "There you are, Mila! Come on, we'll do the corn first - I'm almost out of flour, and the men need to eat!"
Of course they do, Zana thought sourly and struggled to her aching feet, good thing they do, so that we wimminfolk get something to eat once in a while, too.
She shouldn't be so grumpy, Zana scolded herself while she laboured over the mill. Somehow, Yantes had gotten the job of pouring corn into the opening in the middle, while turning the handle had fallen to Zana.
Yantes just didn't know better than to be a good wife, Zana thought, lacking the breath for conversation, which was too bad because she had waited all day for an opportunity to talk with her about...
"Can we take turns? My arms feel like lead," she gasped. Yantes shook her head, but grabbed the handle. Her opinion of soft townsfolk who just weren't up to the task was written clearly in her face, although Zana preferred to think that her expression was more one of pity than contempt.
Pouring the corn into the central hole of the grindstone gave her the opportunity to break the subject that she had been turning around in her head all morning. "Your Remo was quite proud of the new fence he built," she began casually. "He's really talented with humans."
Yantes swelled with pride over her youngest. "My Remo is good with all animals. He never has to beat the ox to make it do what he wants."
"And he also has a quick mind," Zana said slyly. "How he understood the new way of building a fence... just like Polar knew how to build these walls that keep the water in your field. Your family is really smart and inventive - that's why you're keeping up so well on this difficult patch of land."
Yantes hesitated, and Zana realised a bit belatedly that calling her men "inventive" had probably not been the most welcome compliment; Gorillas weren't inclined to break the mould. "It's good to have a smart man at one's side," she said quickly, "someone who knows how to provide for his family." For that, she got Yantes' wholehearted approval.
"So I was thinking," Zana felt her way forward, "since your Remo is as smart as his father, and with Polar being so delighted about this new technique that'll help him to increase the crop yield... what do you think about sending Remo to school?"
"My Remo does go to school!" Yantes said, indignant. "All the boys go, we got a school built last summer, and the new prefect is very strict about it!"
"No, of course, that's not what I meant! I meant a special school, where the boys learn new ways of farming!" Zibaya had suggested introducing new courses in agriculture to ease the way into academia for Gorillas, and Zana could see how that strategy would benefit both their families at home and the lucky ones who got the chance to-
"Ah, that's not necessary." Yantes pursed her lips and shook her head. "We know how to farm, and Polar can teach him everything he needs to know."
"But... Polar himself learned something new yesterday," Zana said, confused. "And he was very pleased about it. Don't you think he'd like Remo to bring home even more useful skills?"
"We don't need new ways of doing things," Yantes said with stubborn calm. "What we have now works just fine."
You're on the brink of foreclosure was on Zana's tongue, but she swallowed the words at the last moment. She didn't understand how the woman across from her could so callously keep her son from rising above the constant struggle for survival - all the advantages had been laid out before her! Her own husband... maybe she should talk to Polar instead. Or let Galen talk to the farmer, since Gorillas were really old-fashioned when it came to taking women seriously.
"I think we should take turns again," Yantes ordered, and stopped the grindstone so that the handle was in front of Zana. The message was loud and clear.
No more talk of new things.
Burke had known that this was going to be a shit day from the moment Anto had stormed into the barn and driven them out with screams and kicks - although this time, they had taken care to sleep outside Bessie's box. Apparently, that was still too close; they were to stay in that drafty corner of the barn. Damn that monkey... his back still hurt. If you get kicked by five hundred pounds of angry gorilla, you'll feel it for a long time.
His dark premonition proved to be correct when not Remo, but Polar gestured him to follow. He trotted along warily; was he to haul the boulders for Virdon's retaining wall today?
But Polar led him a short distance uphill to a half-buried wheel in the ground; at a closer look, it was connected by a smaller, interlocking cogwheel to a horizontal bar hovering roughly at shoulder height.
"Anto and I dug this well a few years ago," the old gorilla said proudly. "We almost doubled the crop since. Now, I need the ox today, but this field is ready and needs to be watered." He gestured towards the bar, and understanding dawned on Burke.
"But it's been raining for the past few days," he protested. "Almost every day!"
The gorilla gave him a stern look, and Burke suspected that if he had really been his owner, he'd have gotten a beating for giving lip, but Polar just said, "the field's too steep to hold the water, and it's freshly sown in. Now get to work." He put Burke's hands on the drive shaft and gave him an encouraging slap on the back.
Burke took a deep breath, put his head down, and pushed.
After overcoming the initial inertia, it became easier to keep moving, but the moment he slacked off, the wheel came to a halt, and he had to strain against the bar again to get it going. Polar watched him for a while, making sure that he got the hang of it, then left him to his own devices.
It was mind-numbing work; after a short while, his arms got heavy, and his shoulders began to ache. The repeating gurgle and splash as the buckets emptied one after the other into the trough was like the ticking of a gigantic clock, the minute hand to the small hand in the sky burning down on his back and neck. With every round he completed around the wheel, Burke could feel another batch of brain cells dying off - by sunset he'd be as dumb and mute as Polar's ox.
Damn the old bastard! Damn Galen and his clumsiness! Burke felt a burning rage as he remembered how the chimp had throned on his chair in the kitchen, the women fussing over him, telling Al and him about his "deal" with the farmer. Nice deal, Galen! Next time, I'll be the one making a deal, and you'll be the one slaving away in a mine, or...
Wasn't gonna happen. Not on this world. A rational part of his mind pointed out that Galen hadn't had much wiggle room for a deal to begin with - under the circumstances, it was actually a pretty smart arrangement.
Still. If he hadn't twisted his ankle...
The sun crept higher in the sky as Burke became intimately acquainted with the ground under his feet. Once he determined a fixed point in his rounds - a pebble with an unusual rose color - he began to count the rotations he completed, but gave up somewhere between seven hundred fifty and seven hundred eighty, because he wasn't sure he had counted correctly. Maybe he had been off since four hundred thirty, who knew?
Was he allowed to have a break at noon? Was it noon already? The sun was high in the sky and burned on his head, making him slightly dizzy. Or perhaps it was the hunger that did it.
"Hey... you," Burke heard Remo's voice from somewhere to his left. He lifted his head and blinked. The boy stood under a tree at the side of the field, a bundle in his one hand, jug in his other.
Oh. So he did get lunch today. Burke let go of the handle and tried to stomp down on the disproportionate happiness welling up inside his gut. He knew Stockholm Syndrome when he saw it. Still, it was nice to sit in the shade and have something to eat, even if it was just some sort of... cake? Bread? Made of nuts, anyway. He wolfed it down without really listening to Remo's chatter.
When he had emptied his jug, Remo jumped up, impatient to get away to do whatever. Burke envied him - the kid didn't know how good he had it, free to roam the fields and woods all day... "Hey," he said, "how did your father like my fence?"
Remo shrugged. "He found it all right."
Burke frowned. He had hoped for a bit more enthusiasm.
"Well, too bad," he said casually, "because if he'd have liked it, I would've had a nice idea for his wheel here, too." He ambled back towards the bar, seemingly through with the topic.
"What idea?"
Burke stilled, forcing the smirk from his face before he turned back to Remo. He shrugged. "I know how to make this wheel turn without anyone moving the handle." He smacked his hand against the bar.
Remo eyed him with a frown. "Yeah, sure. You harness the spirits to it, or what?"
Burke grinned. "In a way... want me to show you?"
He sent Remo away to gather the materials and tools, pushing the bar around for some rounds - let nobody say that he was looking for a way to escape his duties. But of course, when Remo returned, he had to interrupt his work now and then when spoken instructions didn't suffice to get his point across, and he had to show him how to put the parts together. Luckily, he was pushing the handle like a good slave when Anto came by to check on him. Burke had no doubts that he'd have else gotten a beating, owner or not.
Anto was still damn annoyed with their little project, though.
"What's that?" he demanded to know with an indignant jerk of his chin. "Shouldn't you be down at the fence and putting the... the logs in their place?" It was clear that he disapproved of Burke's fence, too.
"It's a windy mill," Remo exclaimed and pointed at Burke. "He's telling me how to build one!"
"Windmill," Burke murmured, but took care to keep his head down. He wasn't eager to get into another row with Anto.
The gorilla shook his head and shoved his little brother away from the half-finished thing and towards the direction of the lower field, where the equally half-finished rail fence was waiting for the boy. "Still more nonsense from the humans - first they turn father's head, and now yours? I won't have that."
Remo dug his heels in like a mule. "I'll get to the fence later! Let me finish this - then the wind can turn the pump, and we can use the ox at the same time!"
"Oh, so you want to cheat on your work, like a human?" Anto pointed accusingly at Burke, who was wisely keeping his mouth shut, and the wheel moving. "Why do you think humans must always be controlled? They are lazy, and they are always looking for ways to avoid the hard work. They need the whip, like father's ox, and if they were my humans, they'd taste it every day!"
Burke had no doubt about that.
"Father doesn't beat the ox very often," Remo objected. Anto ignored him.
"Hard work is the farmer's pride and virtue," he said, and it sounded like something he had heard or learned somewhere. "We are the stewards, we are the gardeners, and we give our care and our strength to the earth, while the human turns it into a desert, if you don't put him on a leash! Think twice about what you're doing, Remo - you don't want to turn our home into a desert, do you?"
Remo was staring at his feet. "No..." he murmured. Anto nodded with grim satisfaction.
"Then come and get to work - and stop playing with the human. He's not a pet." He laid a heavy hand on the boy's neck and steered him downhill, back to the main house.
Burke listened to the gurgle and splash of the buckets emptying. The sun burned down on his neck. He watched his shadow grow longer on the ground as he crept around the wheel, a tiny hand on a giant clock.
When they were washing up that evening, Burke moved as stiffly as Virdon and was in a pretty foul mood. "Stop being so goddamn cheerful!" He sat down heavily on the upturned bucket and pulled his shirt over his head with a groan. "I swear to god, if Galen doesn't get on his feet soon, I'll run away - I'm not made for living on a farm. Gimme tar and concrete..."
"It's like old times," Virdon said with an apologetic smile, "I feel like I'm back on our farm." As long as he had kept the gorilla out of his line of sight, it had been easy to pretend he was back home, the sun hot on his back, and the sweet smelling earth beneath him. It had been peaceful, that silence in his thoughts...
"You're not gonna tell me that your parents were farming like this," Burke made a sweeping gesture. "What were you, Amish?"
"No..." Virdon tapped the bucket with his foot and Burke got up so that he could take it. "They just liked to live off grid, so we did a lot by hand. They thought we were heading into the next big war..." He trailed off, a bit embarrassed. He had made it sound as if his parents had been preppers or crazy hippies, when they had just wanted to take a stand against the agrotech companies that were eating away the landscape. They had wanted to create a little oasis of life in the monocultural desert of the automated gigafarms surrounding them.
Perhaps they had been crazy hippies after all.
"Well, we did, sorta," Burke shrugged, "though the Chinese never made it to our coast."
Virdon hauled up the bucket. "They lost the farm long before that, during the drought." The Drought, with a capital D, that some had compared to the one over a hundred years earlier. They were teaching about it in schools now; Chris had looked at him wide-eyed when he had told him that he had lived through it. Suddenly Alan Virdon had acquired the same historical weight in his son's eyes as General Custer.
"Quite a jump from being a farm boy to joining the Air Force," Burke remarked, but before Virdon could answer, a cry from the barn turned both their heads.
"Should a cow sound like that?" Burke wondered aloud.
Virdon shook his head. "No," he said slowly, eyes still fixed at the building across the yard. "That animal is having problems..." He started towards the barn. Burke followed him.
"I don't think you should go in there, Al," he cautioned. "You'll probably meet the pointy end of Anto's pitchfork." He hovered on the threshold as Virdon vanished into Bessie's box for a quick examination.
When he returned after a minute or so, Anto was still nowhere to be seen - probably still out in the fields, thank god. "She's about to give birth," Virdon said, worried. "One, two days tops, much earlier than I had thought. Perhaps..." he looked back over his shoulder. "Perhaps the last days have been too stressful for her..."
"Oh," Burke held up his hands, "oh no. I'm not taking the blame for that! If anyone has stressed poor Bessie, it was Anto and his morning tantrums! Let's get out of here - I don't want to be cooped up in the barn with Anto when he gets the bad news."
Lingering in the yard didn't make any difference, of course, except giving them more space to escape the young gorilla's slaps and kicks, though there was no escaping his curses. Polar finally ended their merry chase around the yard when he stepped out of the door and demanded to know what the noise was all about. Anto stomped into the house, and a moment later they could hear his voice from the main room, with Zana trying unsuccessfully to get a word in now and then.
"Damn," Burke muttered, trying to catch his breath, "I have a feeling there won't be dinner for us tonight."
Virdon just exhaled heavily, his eyes on the door.