Chapter Twenty-eight
A Year in the Desert
Elizabeth Cutler
I have no idea where Grandmother came from, what her real name is or even how old she is. She could be anywhere between fifty and a thousand years old and is as much a creature of the desert as the coyotes, vultures, and lizards, with iron gray hair falling in a long braid down to her waist and a face the color and apparent texture of one of those appalling dried-apple doll heads. But when she smiles, it lights the place up like a desert sunrise and when she laughs it's practically music. She only ever lets us call her Grandmother, and Malcolm and I are Grandson and Granddaughter, Stu and Elaine, Child or Children, or Boy and Girl depending on the degree of affection or irritation she's feeling toward us at any given moment; safer for all, she says, if we never know her name.
We tend not to use our aliases as often as we probably should. Because of his training, Malcolm is better about it than I am, which is a good thing because I need all the practice I can get answering to a name that's not my own. Most of the time I call him Sweetie and if he isn't using my alias he usually refers to me as Love, though other pet names sometimes slip in. If Grandmother knows who Malcolm is (and I can't believe she doesn't), she never lets on. She certainly recognized him when we showed up outside her house from that one time we helped that treacherous bitch Amanda Cole give out medicines and stuff, even though he was, of course, wrapped up to the eyes on that day, as were we all, and never removed the disguise outside the shuttle; but I can't imagine she's never seen him on a television screen, especially considering she'd travelled around the American distribution network offering her services for years before Cole became involved. In fact, it's through her that we learn that Trip, Cole and company did not establish the network, but merely tapped into it, supporting and organizing different underground swap meets and market places that were already there.
So, we're both convinced she actually does know who Malcolm is, but for whatever reason is willing to ignore the truth (and the potentially enormous reward for turning him in) and grant us both asylum in her little hovel. The old Malcolm would have found the situation terrifying, to say the least, and would almost certainly have killed the old woman our first night here on the chance that she might let something slip, but the Malcolm travelling with me now accepts it all with surprising equanimity.
One night a few months into our stay, as we lie in our bed – our mattress freshly stuffed with desert grasses and smelling sweetly of lavender – I ask him about his unusual calm in such precarious circumstances.
"Look around you, Liz," he replies, keeping his voice low because our room (defined by two blankets Grandmother had him hang from the ceiling in a corner of the house), is less than three meters from her bed on the other side of the fireplace.
When I open my mouth to make a quip about there not being much to see at the moment, he knows I'm going to say something silly. He closes the knuckles of his middle and index finger around my nose and shakes it gently, his way of telling me to pay attention. "I know it's dark, but you've seen what she has."
"Not much," I comment, seriously, rather than jokingly.
"Right," he agrees, "but if you've been paying attention, you'll realize she earns a lot more than she spends, and I mean a lot. I don't know where it's all going, but I hope she's putting some of it away to support her when she can't look after herself any more and I'm sure she's using some of it to help out people in the village. More importantly, I've been talking to her, and would you believe that, since she was widowed, she's been traveling thousands of miles every other year to underground markets, swap meets and distribution points? She goes from the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountains to Southern Peru, the Amazon and the Northern Atlantic coast of South America, into the Caribbean, Southeastern North America, and across the Southern Plains, offering her skills, her knowledge and her medicinal herbs to desperately needy people who haven't a hope in hell of ever being able to compensate her.
"Now, she doesn't have a flitter and Pious and Patience wouldn't be able to make that trip once in ten years, let alone every other year for the past few decades."
"So, she must be hitching rides with other people."
"Exactly. And most likely it's with other people who visit the same markets and distribution events, because there's no way she could be sure of getting there on the precise dates if she relied on the random chance of catching a ride."
"So, why does that make you trust her?"
"Because she has so little and gives so much. She's certainly not interested in making money, she has deep ties with the underground network, and I'm sure she's seen enough to not judge people too harshly. She believes in second chances. I'm sure she remembers me from the distribution we helped with in the rainforest, and whether she knows who I am or not, she's decided that as long as I'm making an effort to help, she'll protect me. And even if I'm wrong about all of that, she adores you, and as long as you love me, she'll protect me for your sake."
"Well, then, you're safe as long as we stay here," I whisper and give him a squeeze.
He chuckles softly. "As much as I appreciate the sentiment, Love, I don't like imposing on some poor old woman and depending on her for protection, and I really hate putting her at risk if we should be found here. We need to leave as soon as we're able."
"I agree, but, Malcolm?"
"Hmm?"
"Let's try to do some good while we're here. We can leave Grandmother better off than we found her and maybe help the people in the village or at the medical camp."
"We'll see what we can do," he agrees. "But I'm not sure about you going into that medical camp. If they've seen one video of you talking about Jupiter Station Memorial Hospital…"
I sigh. "I know, being medical professionals, they'd be more likely to watch it, pay attention, and recognize me."
"And that could put us all in jeopardy, but we'll work something out," he assures me, and feeling surprisingly happy despite our circumstances, I snuggle down beside him and fall asleep.
=/\=
In actual fact, 'as soon as we're able' had already come and gone long before we'd had that conversation. 'As soon as we're able' would have been just a few days after our arrival. If we'd really been trying, we could have acquired a change of clothes for each of us, got a map, made a plan, filled our packs with food, water and other necessities, and been ready to go in less than a week; but I suggested, and Malcolm agreed, that Grandmother could teach us a lot about how to survive in all the different places she'd travelled (not that we hadn't had military survival training, but in each new ecosystem, there's a lot to learn about what to expect from the weather and seasons and what's safe to eat and when and where to find it, and it's a lot safer to learn all of that through the benefit of someone else's experience rather than doing it the hard way for oneself). He also mentioned that we both could benefit from the hard physical work required to survive in the desert. As military officers, we were required to maintain a certain degree of physical fitness, but life on Jupiter Station was hardly demanding by comparison. Though he deftly managed to avoid calling me soft, he did point out that my long shifts as a nurse weren't adequate to build the kind of strength and stamina needed for a life on the run in the wilderness, and he didn't even bother to list all the ways he was still recovering from what he'd been through in the past few years.
So, we've fitted ourselves into Grandmother's life. We do what she asks, and ask her to teach us what we need to know. As we help her harvest the bounty of the desert as each plant comes into season, she teaches us what parts of which plants are edible and how to prepare them. Malcolm comes along on the foraging trips to be sure he learns to recognize the edible plants, but then he works on his various repair projects while Grandmother teaches me how to preserve them.
We arrived just in time to help harvest nopales, the new leaves of the prickly pear cactus. So, the day after her third trip to town in as many days (she had only planned two, but needed a third one to get Mal's construction supplies and the extra load of feed he agreed to unload for her), Grandmother provides Malcolm and me with heavy, stiff leather work gloves to protect our hands from the cactus spines, and we all ride out into the desert with the burros pulling the little cart, and pick several bushels of the bright green, paddle-like leaves. It's slow work, but not particularly hard. We only take about a third of what we find, leaving the rest behind so the plants can grow and produce more next year. The day is hot, but not unbearably so with the temperature rising to just over thirty degrees at midday, though Grandmother says it will be getting closer to forty at midday by the end of the month. Still, it's more physical labor than Malcolm and I are used to, and Grandmother laughs at us when we collapse into bed immediately after finishing the washing-up following dinner. I have no idea how much longer she stays up, because I'm asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, but at least I know we haven't left her any evening chores that we could help her with.
The next morning, I'm so stiff and sore I can barely get out of bed. Malcolm fares a little better than I do, probably because he's always been more religious about exercise so his body is better able to recover. I'm slow about starting the coffee and setting the table, and Malcolm and Grandmother are back from feeding the animals before I've finished making toast. I grin ruefully when Grandmother teases me by asking which of us is older.
"I don't mind earning my keep," I tell her. "I just need a week or two to get used to it."
"Might be easier just to sing for your supper, girl," she jokes.
I shake my head. "You wouldn't say that if you've ever heard me sing."
Nopales, it turns out, can be substituted for almost any green vegetable in almost any recipe, though Grandmother does warn me that if we eat them raw, Malcolm and I should start slowly, eating only small quantities at first to see how we tolerate it because it can have a laxative effect in some people. For the next week, Malcolm sets snares for small game in the mornings, works on rebuilding the chicken coop during the day, and checks his traps before dinner while Grandmother and I spend our days processing the nopales. We start each day by removing the needles off the leaves that we're going to use that day. This is usually accomplished by briefly grilling them over a hot fire in the barbecue pit. At first, we have to be careful not to knock the loose blocks into the flames, but late that afternoon, after the fire's out and the blocks have cooled off, Malcolm mixes up some mortar and resets them.
The first day we cut the nopales into strips about two centimeters wide and ten centimeters long, and mix them with sliced onions, whole garlic cloves, and strips of bell pepper to make three different varieties of pickles. We make four dozen jars each of sweet pickles in a sugar brine with allspice, cinnamon, and cloves; dill pickles with mustard and celery seed; and spicy pickles with hot peppers in addition to the bell peppers, extra garlic, black peppercorns and red pepper flakes. Another day, we blanch and freeze them. Whole perfect leaves are wrapped four to a pack in butcher paper; those with blemishes are cut into bite-sized pieces or diced up fine, seasoned with a bit of salt and packed into half- and quarter-liter containers. One morning, Grandmother tells me not to build the fire in the barbecue pit, and we spend most of the morning wearing our heavy leather gloves and slicing the spines off the nopales by hand and inspecting each other's work to make absolutely certain nothing has been missed. She explains that we're going to shred and ferment the cactus leaves with salt like some kind of desert sauerkraut or kimchi, so we can't burn the spines off because the heat of the flame will kill the bacteria needed for fermentation. As with the pickles, we make three different varieties in her twenty-liter fermentation crocks. One batch contains half a kilogram of caraway seeds, another contains grated ginger, turmeric and black peppercorns and the third has sliced hot peppers and whole cloves of garlic.
After we've finished filling the crocks, when I ask why she can't just make some kind of starter solution with live bacteria like bakers do for sourdough bread so that she can just burn the needles off and save herself the extra work, she stares at me for so long that I begin to apologize for questioning her. Then she shakes her head and tells me, "No child, no need to apologize. I'm just feelin' stupid right now, because I been doin' this the hard way my whole damn life." Then we make one more crock of the cactus 'kraut that she will continue to feed with different desert vegetables that come in season throughout the year so she can use the juices of that mixture to inoculate next year's run.
I'm pleased to have offered a helpful suggestion, but I don't even pretend to think I'll have much more to teach Grandmother.
The rest of the nopales we slice into strips. Half of them we hang in the drying shed, and the other half we marinate in some kind of teriyaki sauce-like concoction that Grandmother made with stuff from the desert before hanging them in the smokehouse for a week. Then it becomes Malcolm's job to keep the smoldering fire going with damp mesquite chips from a tub beside the smokehouse. And of course, as long as fresh leaves are available, we eat them in different dishes several times a week. We have them stewed with garden tomatoes that Grandmother canned last year, stuffed and baked with seasoned minced venison and cheese, battered and deep fried, and (as a special treat for Malcolm when he moved the chickens into their restored coop and henhouse) stir-fried with ginger, pineapple, and pork over rice.
And so, the weeks and the seasons pass. When there's something ready to harvest, we all go out into the desert and work together. Then Malcolm works on his repairs and improvements to the property while Grandmother and I process the wild produce. As Malcolm insulates and replaces the roofs, I learn the medicinal uses of mesquite leaves and sap and help Grandmother hang clusters of brilliant red ocotillo flowers in the drying shed to be used in herbal teas later (though while they're in season, we throw some of the fresh blossoms into fruit salads and custards for a burst of color and sweetness). While Grandmother teaches me to freeze and dry the green seeds of palo verde and ironwood trees to be used like peas, Malcolm dismantles the drunkenly leaning corral and rebuilds it, setting the posts in cement this time so they'll stay where they belong. Then it's time to harvest the desert chia flower heads, but we just dry them and set them aside along with the mesquite pods that are ready a few days later because the sweet saguaro cactus fruit ripens next, and it can't wait to be processed.
There are actually five or six types of edible cactus fruit that ripen in waves from late June through early April. They're all mucilaginous, which takes some getting used to, but dehydrating them or cooking them reduces that problem considerably, and some of them, like the prickly pear and the cholla fruit have tiny spines called glochids that have to be removed before eating. They have very different flavor profiles from bland to sweet to so tart they make you pucker up until you feel like your head is going to turn inside out, but with enough sugar (or date syrup, honey, agave nectar or other sweetener) they can all be turned into pies or pastry filling or syrup to flavor iced tea and other beverages. Some of them, like the prickly pear, can be puréed and then dried in sheet pans to make a very tasty leathery fruit snack. The barrel cactus fruit is best candied and tossed into baked goods or dried and used in savory dishes like soup or as an aromatic flavor for roast chicken or pork. Most of them have nutty tasting edible seeds that my scanner tells me are just chock full of protein and healthy fats.
In between the cactus fruit harvests, there are chiltepin peppers, which provide a ridiculous amount of heat for something that's only about a centimeter long; devil's claw, which can be harvested green and used like a vegetable or allowed to mature and dry out in order to harvest and toast the seeds; tart little wolfberries, which ripen in the spring and again in late summer; and mature, dry palo verde and ironwood seeds, which can be ground into flour like the mesquite pods. Yucca, which seems to grow everywhere, has different parts that can be harvested and used throughout the year. The roots make a passable soap, the leaves can be processed to make rope, and the bud, before it sprouts up into a huge, showy pillar of creamy white blossoms over a meter tall above the spiky leaves of the plant, can be chopped up and cooked like a vegetable that has a taste reminiscent of asparagus. When it blooms, the crispy flowers taste a bit like cucumber and are good eaten raw on their own, tossed into a salad, or sauteed in butter with other spring vegetables. Then, in the center of the column of blossoms, is a stalk or stem over a meter long and weighing eight kilos or more that can be roasted or sautéed and used like squash, pickled, or sliced thin and fried into chips for a salty snack.
=/\=
It's fortunate that we have so much to do, as life around here is terribly isolated from the outside world. With sunshine being an abundant commodity in the desert, electricity comes from solar generators; most of the equipment has seen many better days, however, and things frequently break down – requiring ever more desperate repair jobs.
The standard of living for most of the people in the village is somewhere between low and primitive. Life expectancy is ten or twenty years shorter than the average in a big city, because for all that the desert provides, you have to have the land from which to gather its bounty and be willing to work hard to make use of it. The people in town have traded, willingly or otherwise, some of their quality of life and longevity for a little more ease and convenience. I have to admit, it's probably the choice I would have made if I'd had a choice; but having none, I have learned how satisfying it is to work hard every day and make one's living from the land, and now, I couldn't be happier. And, Grandmother tells us, people around here share what little they have and try to help one another whenever possible, so at least the poverty has created a sense of community that you don't usually find in wealthier areas.
Unfortunately, that sense of community is not enough to keep people around when other opportunities beckon. Most of the young people up and leave as soon as they can, heading for the bright lights, adventure, and better comfort of city life. For some families, if the parents are older or if there are small children around the house, their leaving can be a hardship because their help is needed with the hard labor of keeping the household going or caring for the little ones. For other families, when the parents are still fit and able, or if any remaining children are able to care for themselves and help with chores, their leaving can actually be a benefit. With one fewer mouth to feed and one fewer body to clothe and shelter, there's a little more for those who are left behind. Sometimes, the prodigal finds work in the city and remembering, at least for a few months, the desperate need of those 'back home', sends them a few credits every month. In the very best of cases, at least from the point of view of a family struggling not to starve out in the desert, the wandering child will qualify for a position in one branch or another of the Imperial Military or Civil Services – be it the Starfleet, the MACOs, the BII, Imperial Security or one of the various government Ministries – and choose to have a percentage of each paycheck sent directly back to the family. Grandmother says the stipend received from a grown child who has found a place in Imperial service is often enough to make a family financially stable, if not comfortable, but most of the time those who leave the desert community either vanish completely, as if they have fallen off the edge of the world, or come home in disgrace after finding they have neither the social skills nor the education to make their way out in the larger world.
News comes mostly from newssheets that passers-by occasionally drop off. These get passed around the community until everyone has read them and they are weeks out of date. Then they're used to wrap packages or humble presents for someone's birthday or anniversary or to pack fragile items for storage and transport. When they become too faded, fragile and worn even for these simple purposes, they become tinder for a fire or mulch in someone's garden.
While the news sheets are invaluable to people like Grandmother who live too far from town to casually stroll to the store whenever they feel like it, the one television at Capshaw's Mercantile is turned on for any customer who requests it for a little entertainment or education and for four hours almost every Saturday morning for shoppers to catch up with a show called The Weekend Update that summarizes the big stories from the previous week. They also stay open late for certain special events, like the Empress's Anniversary Celebration, the Academy Awards, and all day for the parades and fireworks celebrating Zephram Cochran's victory over the first invading Vulcan ship to reveal their presence on Revelation Day. Though they could charge admission, the owners are good people and choose not to – although they're more than happy to conduct business after hours on those evenings, selling lots of snacks like hot, buttery popcorn, cheesy nachos and individual boxes of candy. In fact, Grandmother tells me, for many of the local families, those special programs are a night out which they save up for weeks to enjoy and everyone shows up freshly washed and wearing their best outfit, if they have one. Sometimes, though, if the weather is bad, the signal is weak and the picture snowy because we're so far from any city large enough to broadcast a decent signal and nobody here can afford a satellite receiver, but even then, if you concentrate, you can still glean the gist of things.
Out here in the desert with so little interference, communicator and radio reception is excellent, except in the rainy season, Grandmother tells us; but few of the locals have radios, even fewer have communicator arrays, and batteries are prohibitively expensive anyway. Of course, they could be rigged to run off the decrepit solar generators, but the meager, not-quite-reliable electricity supply is more important for stuff like refrigerators – so much more important to prevent food spoiling overnight in the baking heat than to listen to the weekly top forty countdown. Meanwhile, what few emergency communications there are (generally desperate calls for medical attention that are often answered far too late and are frequently followed by death announcements to distant family) usually run through the comm array at the general store. Again, the owners don't charge for this service – they could demand any price they wanted, though most of the locals wouldn't be able to afford it – but they will accept 'donations' of whatever people have to offer, the thought being they can sell the produce or objects off to other locals in need or to passers-by or use them for themselves, and have the value of the items to go toward the cost of maintaining and using the comm equipment.
Most of what you'd call 'technology' is concentrated in the health clinic where I work, which never has enough of anything for the people who sometimes walk for literally days to get there. They have their own comm equipment, an ancient electric motorbike, and a fast horse to use in a pinch, and they do their best to respond to every emergency call they get; but usually, by the time someone has made the trek to the general store to place the call – or to the camp itself if it's closer – it's already too late. The only time they seem to catch a break is when some woman goes into labor and her man (often not her legal husband, because people around here can't afford the marriage license fee) gets to the store right away to summon help with the delivery; though even then, due to poor pre-natal care and the proximity of a toxic waste dump that was never properly cleaned up, the number of birth defects and stillbirths is easily ten times the Imperial average. Jeremy Lucas would weep to see it.
Malcolm estimated early on that one hundred million credits would be enough to light up the village like Las Vegas, repair every home within a ten-kilometer radius and give them each a brand new generator, clean up the toxic waste, and build a proper hospital – including the ambulance service – for the region. Considering the sparse population, he imagines the revenues on an endowment of that same amount would be enough to run the hospital in perpetuity. Two hundred million credits sounds an inconceivably large number to me, but to put it in perspective, he explains that if the Imperial budget was a twenty-liter bucket of water, one hundred million credits would be barely a molecule, let alone a drop; but nothing would ever be done because no one around here has anything to offer that the Empire couldn't just take.
"Except for us," I pointed out.
"Except for us," he agreed with a grim sigh, so we stayed close to Grandmother's house while Malcolm grew out a beard and worked on his accents, which was as hilarious as it was terrifying because his attempts to imitate Trip sounded absolutely ludicrous. The terrifying part was that, while his natural, cultured British accent was way too familiar and would give him away at the first 'Hello' in this part of the world, a mangled regional American accent would draw too much curious attention. Finally, I persuaded him to adopt an Irish one instead (he had an Irish grandmother, so knew what it sounded like) since the vast majority of Americans wouldn't know the difference.
=/\=
During the hottest part of the summer, it reaches or exceeds forty degrees every day for three weeks in a row, topping out at just over 43 degrees. We do our most physical chores early in the morning or after sunset, and shelter in the house or the storage cave during the hottest part of the day. When it's too hot to work outdoors, we pass our time with more sedentary tasks. Grandmother has Malcolm fetch bales of wool out of her attic and teaches me to spin it into yarn that we knit and crochet into hats, gloves, scarves, mittens, and sweaters, and weave into blankets and shawls. The finest fibers, she spins into soft threads herself and weaves into a sturdy cloth that can be cut and sewn into warm wool shirts and dresses or winter coats. She shows me how it's done, but apologetically explains that the fiber is too valuable a commodity for her to let me practice on considering I'm not planning to stay long enough to learn to do it properly. I take no offense at her remark, because really, we should have left months ago. Instead, once she has shown me the finer points of her remarkable skills, I turn to grinding the mesquite pods and the dried ironwood and palo verde beans into flour for her. I've already learned well enough to spin a serviceable yarn out of coarser wool, and the grinding is a brute task that is really hard to get wrong.
When I'm not polishing my domestic skills or processing foods harvested from the desert, I spend my time studying Grandmother's collection of medicinal herbs. She has a big book full of sketches and pressed samples of flowers, stems, leaves and roots of different plants from all over the Americas. There are also seeds that she's glued to some of the pages, and bits of bark from some of the useful trees. Everything is divided by regions, with the local flora obviously being the biggest, and in the back are two indexes, one listing the plants alphabetically, and the other listing various conditions and which plants can be used to treat them. I hone my drawing skills by copying her sketches into a blank journal she buys me on one of her trips to town, and as each of the local items becomes available, I take my samples of whatever parts are useful and press them into my book. I don't know if I'll ever be as confident as Grandmother in identifying and using medicinal herbs, especially the ones I haven't actually seen and harvested myself yet, but when Malcolm and I begin to travel, if I can find someone with local knowledge, perhaps I can convince them to mentor me for a time.
Malcolm spends his time tinkering when it's too hot to work outdoors. First, he services and repairs the refrigerators and freezers in the storage cave and the solar panels and batteries that run them. Then he finds an old transistor radio in the tool crib, and gets that working. When Grandmother realizes just how good he is with electronics, she takes him to an old dump out in the desert where we collect a number of broken solar panels, an old refrigerator, a freezer and a little electric hot plate. Over the next few weeks, he cannibalizes several of the solar panels to get the four best ones working. Then he identifies the parts he needs for the refrigerator and the freezer, and makes another trip out to the dump to find them in other discarded machines. Recognizing a marketable skill when she sees it in action, Grandmother suggests he should offer his services as a repairman, but he's not so sure.
"Apart from the fact that I don't want to associate with too many people in any one place, what would I do with the proceeds?" He doesn't want to refuse outright, but his reluctance is obvious and I can understand why; the fewer people he meets, the better. "Elaine and I are undocumented, so we can't get a credit chip."
"Don't mean you can't get credit, Grandson," she tells him. "First of all, I know a few needy families 'round here who'd never be able to pay for a refurbished solar panel, but they'd be happy to give names an' addresses an' letters recommendin' you to friends an' family hundreds of miles from here who'll be happy to let you sleep on their floor on a cold or wet night, especially if'n you showed up with a few kilos of apples or a poke full of wild greens you just picked, or a brace of rabbits or a young wild pig or something you trapped or killed fresh before arrivin'. If'n you don't have anything to trade, they'll more'n likely have chores they need help with or something for you to repair for 'em. An' you'll be surprised to find out that po' folks are more likely'n rich ones to show you a little kindness just 'cause you're the friend of a friend.
"Now, once those needy folks are taken care of, I can talk to Capshaw an' find out how many solar panels an' what other appliances he might be interested in. He'll either buy 'em from you outright, sell 'em on consignment, or work as a middleman to help you sell 'em on to other used goods stores in other towns. He'll take the credits you'd have gotten from sellin' those things an' set up an account for you with the store. Then, whenever you need something, the funds'll be there to pay for it. Once you start travellin', you can buy some easy-to-carry an' easy-to-barter things like meal bars, batteries, an' first aid supplies to help you along, an' if'n you ever get in a desperate bind, you can call him collect an' he'll send the credits to someone for you."
He looks at me questioningly, and I shrug and tell him he'd know better than I do how safe it would be. "I can say that the Capshaws are good people, so you can trust them with our money; and it would be nice to help the needy people around here."
"Now, you're a whole man, Grandson, an' you already do more'n enough to earn your keep 'round here," Grandmother says. Smiling at me, she adds, "Both of you do. So I'm not sayin' you got to do this. I'm just suggestin' it as a way to make you both a little more secure."
Malcolm nods slowly. "I'll think about it."
A few weeks after that, half a dozen of the poorest families in the village wake up to find used but serviceable solar panels decorated with bouquets of desert flowers and bows of dried grasses on their front steps. The flowers and bows are my idea to assure them that these are gifts and no one will ever come seeking any kind of compensation for them. As much as Malcolm likes the idea of the references and letters of recommendation to help us in our travels, he's still reluctant to get too familiar with too many of the locals, not only because of the danger we present to them, but also because of the ever-present risk that someone could twig who we are and turn us in. Soon after the solar panels are delivered, Capshaw's Mercantile begins carrying an eclectic variety of small, used appliances like radios, microwaves, and electric kettles. Every now and then, they'll take a request for something larger, like a refrigerator, a stove, or a water heater, with the understanding that there's no guarantee on if or when the item will be available. Mr. Capshaw just notifies the requestor in a few weeks that the item is ready or that he won't be able to procure it. On rare occasions, Grandmother will come home with a broken item that someone has asked to have repaired, and if Malcolm can find the parts, she takes it back with her on the next trip and the owner pays Capshaw a few credits which he deposits into our account at the mercantile.
Malcolm's old habits of caution are far too ingrained to overcome, so we've come up with this way in which he can do the work without risking being identified. But I still have to smile as I watch him working over a heap of rusty old parts for the benefit of a family whose existence he wouldn't even have noticed when he was mad, bad General Reed.
Back on Jupiter Station, Trip spoke once of kindness being a flower whose seeds would drift through the world and take root in the unlikeliest of places. I suppose in the beginning he couldn't have imagined any place less likely than in the stony heart of the guy who'd tried to blind him back aboard Enterprise, and would have used any excuse afterwards to have him put against a wall and shot if only he'd been able to find one. But there you go. I hope wherever he is, he's still proud.
=/\=
It isn't long before Malcolm has a tidy little repair business going. He goes to the dump every so often and looks for salvageable items and the parts to fix them – he says it could take years to pick the place clean, so he doesn't ever have to worry about running out of supplies – and every two or three weeks, Grandmother takes whatever he gets working to town for Mr. Capshaw to sell to his sources.
=/\=
Grandmother has to go to town every so often whether she needs groceries or not, so hauling whatever Malcolm has to sell isn't a hardship for her. A healthy, mature chicken will lay an egg a day for about nine months out of the year in this part of the world (Grandmother explains that it all depends on how much sunlight they get). With two dozen chickens, that's more than the three of us could ever use, even if we each ate two a day in addition to whatever Grandmother used in the rest of her cooking. So, she cleans them up, puts them in the fridge, and takes the excess into town every other week. She says it's too much work and would require too much food to hatch them out and raise them for meat, and she wouldn't be able to sell enough of them around here to make it worth her while anyway.
"Old Capshaw tells me I could get 'em certified pasture-raised organic an' sell 'em on to a wholesaler in the city for five times what it costs me to grow 'em," she says, "but I don't want no gov'ment official out here 'spectin' my place every year to renew my certificate. 'Sides, most of those city fools payin' a credit per egg an' eight credits per kilo for a chicken just want to show off how rich they are an' don't give a damn about how the animals are treated!"
Then she tells me what she saw when her high school agricultural club toured a commercial poultry and egg farm, and I can't imagine practices have improved any since then. By the end of her story, I'm nauseous and crying. I've seen – and experienced – unimaginable cruelty in the Imperial Fleet, but what we do to dumb, helpless animals to maximize profit is beyond the pale.
"I'd sooner give the eggs away to feed hungry po' folks than get rich sellin' 'em to feed some damned city fools' egos. So that's what me an' Capshaw do!" she says proudly. "Anyone with a quarter of a credit can get two eggs, a slice of toast, an' a cup of black coffee at the lunch counter any time they're hungry. If'n they can't afford that, they can get 'em for free just by askin', an if they're too proud to take something for nothing, Capshaw'll give 'em some small job around the store to pay for it in trade."
=/\=
Days come and go, and the seasons change. We watch the desert wither and bloom. As 'Elaine', I eventually finish organizing and streamlining the clinic's recordkeeping and inventory systems. 'Stu' gets all their equipment up to scratch and teaches most of the staff to properly maintain it. When I'm not working with patients, Opie lets me read the latest medical journals so I can keep up-to-date with current best practices. As the staff gets better at keeping the equipment running, there is less and less for 'Stu' to do around the clinic, so he takes to dropping me off and then going hunting in the desert with his slingshot or fishing in one of the larger pools downstream in the arroyo until it's time to head home. On particularly successful days, he'll even have an extra brace of rabbits or a string of fish to give to the clinic staff.
It's no shock when, a few weeks after the Imperial Wedding, which was spectacular and Grandmother and I rode into town to watch, Austin is crowned Emperor, but the number of duties and privileges the Empress is allowed to retain creates quite a stir. "She could have done worse," Malcolm observes when I tell him the news. "He could have, too."
Emperor Burnell doesn't make any changes right away. Malcolm supposes that he's studying the situation and getting the lay of the land and says it's a good thing. "He's a meticulous planner. He won't do anything rash, and he won't take any action until he has planned out all the contingencies and consequences and decided how to deal with them. He's also a patriot, so I really don't think he will do anything to make things worse, but you can be certain, when he does make his move, the repercussions will be felt throughout the Empire."
Soon after the coronation, Malcolm has his meltdown, and the three of us, he and I and Grandmother, suffer through a few contentious weeks while he prepares for and undertakes a vision quest under her guidance. I'm furious with her for suggesting it and upset with him for agreeing. To me, it seems ridiculously and unnecessarily dangerous, but as Malcolm and Grandmother both point out, I haven't been able to help him clear that final hurdle in his recovery. I only relent when Malcolm says he'll leave if I don't let him try. He's terrified of hurting us.
Defying all scientific explanation, the vision quest works. My medical scanner shows areas of his brain that always used to show activity associated with his trauma are quieter (as in, in the range of normal activity quieter), for the first time since I was entrusted with his medical care. Moreover, the traces of Phlox's drugs that we had always assumed were chemically bonded with Malcolm's neurons have mostly broken down and been carried away through the body's normal waste filtration functions. I can't explain it; I'm not even close to understanding it. The chemistry simply doesn't work. Nothing in Grandmother's potions, no combination of things, should have been able to break those chemical bonds and free Malcolm of the drugs' residual influence.
Grandmother just smiles enigmatically and says, "Man's puny, evil magic is like dust in the desert being swept up and carried away in the mighty wind of the Great Spirit. He saw that Grandson was sincere in his desire to let go of his burden, and so He freed him."
I've never been particularly spiritual, and I don't really care how it happened. I'm just happy Malcolm seems so much better, so I smile back, and say, "You must be right."
The vision itself, Malcolm and I assume, was just a result of him being malnourished, dehydrated and high as a kite, but he tells me what he can remember about it, and says it was psychologically therapeutic. Grandmother, of course, insists he was walking with the spirits and they were guiding him to repair what was broken inside him. Malcolm chuckles and makes some quip about his spirit guide being some blonde Floridian hick, but we're both so pleased with the results and so grateful for her help, that we don't bother disagreeing with her.
We never hear anything about Trip's court martial. Malcolm thinks they're still hoping to catch the rest of us and turn the tribunal into a primetime television special.
Emperor Burnell is in the news a lot, especially considering he isn't really doing anything newsworthy, and in nearly every picture I see of him, that treacherous bitch, Amanda Cole, is in the background. It makes me so angry I get sick to my stomach.
"Trust me, love, her day of reckoning will come," Malcolm tells me when I quietly cry tears of outrage in our bed at night. And by the note in his voice, which chills me to the bone, I know he means it.
I can't bring myself to tell him it isn't enough. I don't want him to ever know that I want to be the one to exact revenge for this betrayal. Despite all evidence to the contrary – despite the fact that I tried to gut him like a fish when I fell for Erika Hernandez's ruse and thought he was just using me – he still thinks I am the one good, pure and honest thing in his life.
=/\=
Malcolm is right about Austin. When he finally does make his first move, it comes with sweeping changes in personnel at all levels of government. Whole departments are dismissed en masse, their functions absorbed into others that survive the purge or new ones that are formed. Nigel Odoemene, Minister of Homeworld Trade and Transit, is arrested for embezzlement and other crimes against the Empire, with more charges and possibly additional arrests anticipated. Malcolm huffs a quiet laugh. "About bloody time. He always was a loathsome, greedy little bastard."
Most of the new ministers are unknown to the public. The overwhelming majority of them have held leadership roles in industrial, banking, commercial and academic institutions and organizations, but only two or three of them have ever worked in the government before. When she comes home from one of her egg runs, Grandmother brings us a newssheet with brief biographies of each of them and some of the assistants and subordinates they have hired.
One day, I'm reading to him about the new Minister of Homeworld Agriculture and Forestry Management while he's tinkering with some gadget for Capshaw's to sell when he interrupts me. "What was that name?"
"William Wainwright. Do you know him?"
"I…yes…er, no." He looks around to be sure Grandmother is out of earshot, but she often leaves us to discuss the news in private. It's one more reason I'm sure she knows exactly who we are. "He's a childhood friend of Trip's. I learned about him through the mind meld."
"Oh? My." I look back at the article I am reading. "It says here, he has 'high hopes for improving the food supply distribution network because he's old friends with the new Minister of Homeworld Trade and Transit, Anthony Jackson, former CEO and Head of Distribution for the American Lumber Coalition, which represents sixty-five percent of the lumber mills in the Western Hemisphere'."
He shakes his head, frowning. "That name's not familiar to me, but what in the hell is Austin up to?"
The mystery deepens two weeks later when the next newssheet covers Emperor Burnell's first Imperial Decree, which grants Vulcan autonomous home rule for homeworld regulation and names Captain Matthew Brice, formerly of the Erebus, as military governor to liaise with Earth.
"Matthew Brice? Does it say where he's from?"
I skim the article quickly. "Panama City, Florida." I get a slightly queasy feeling. "You don't suppose…"
"He's another friend of Trip's," Malcolm says with conviction.
The article indicates that if the plan is successful, Andoria and Tellar are likely to follow within the next five to ten years. It doesn't sound like much to me, but according to Malcolm, it's a huge step forward for Vulcan.
"It means they're no longer a conquered world, they're a vassal planet." All I have to do is roll my eyes and he knows I think that's a distinction without a difference, so he goes on to explain. "They still have to supply whatever resources the Empire demands, but they get to practice their own culture and govern their own people according to their own customs. If the Empire calls for 100,000 conscripts, they get to decide who to send. They won't have to pull students out of school or parents away from their families if they can find other suitable troops. They get to decide who is exempt from the draft, so long as they can supply the required number of fit bodies. If the Empire demands crops or minerals, they determine from which region and using what methods they will gather and transport them."
I set down the newssheet and stare at him. "Why do you think he's doing this?"
He doesn't answer immediately, but nips at his lower lip while he continues rubbing at the rusted contact with a piece of sandpaper, a sure sign his mind is working furiously. "It sounds like he's trying to build up our bases within the Imperial borders. I wouldn't be surprised if he starts slowing the rate of expansion within the year, but what really boggles me is all these connections to Trip."
"And why do you think the papers aren't mentioning that?"
A huff of a laugh. "That's easy. The Emperor doesn't want them to."
Over the next weeks and months, there's some shuffling of military personnel. Admiral Hernandez is stripped of her ship, the Revenge, and reassigned to training duties at the Starfleet Academy. The Revenge is given to Captain Philip Georgiou, while his former first officer is promoted to captain and takes command of the Viper. The Sherman's March isrecalled from her mission behind enemy lines and, along with the Revenge, the Viper and a handful of other ships now under Admiral Grady's command, she is assigned to patrol the borders of Imperial Space.
Next, new battleship construction at Jupiter Station is reduced by fifty percent. We're still at war, so other facilities keep going at full speed, and JS continues refitting older ships, but they also start building construction ships and sections for modular space stations. The fact that Austin is making all of these changes public is almost as remarkable as the fact that they're happening. Even I can tell that he is shifting focus from expansion towards building infrastructure and securing the Empire as it exists today.
"Do you think he might be planning to end the war?" I ask Malcolm hopefully one day.
He shakes his head regretfully. "I don't see how that would be possible in our lifetimes, but if he can change enough minds, establish a dynasty and train his successor to follow in his footsteps, in a hundred years, anything's possible."
We still hear nothing about Trip's court martial.
Almost before we know it, it's been nearly a year. I've memorized and copied everything from Grandmothers book of medicinal plants. Malcolm has learned new repair and construction skills. We've both improved our strength and stamina. The rains have come and gone. Grandmother's hens have stopped laying for the winter and started again. The nopal cactuses are sprouting new leaves which will be ready to harvest in a few weeks.
One evening, apropos of nothing, Malcolm looks at me and says, "I think it's time for us to go."
My heart breaks a little at that. I want to argue, but the truth is, I've been thinking the same thing. I can't think of a single reason for us to stay that outweighs the continued risk we pose to Grandmother.
I turn to him and smile sadly. I don't want to leave, but I'm kind of excited for a new adventure. "I think you're right."
=/\=
We couldn't stay here forever, of course. Though Grandmother doesn't have many visitors, there has always been a danger that someone might come unexpectedly and be inconveniently curious about the two strangers staying with her. It was one thing for her to introduce me to the Capshaws as her granddaughter when we went to the mercantile; my straw hat, sunglasses and shawl went a long way toward concealing my identity. But having someone show up at the house would have been another matter altogether. For one thing, it would be suspicious for me to stay covered up in the house; for another, they'd see Malcolm.
Still, Grandmother made us welcome, shrugging away the danger. She's given us a master class in survival in the eleven-plus months we have been here, patiently teaching us about different signs and warnings to look for in our travels and how to take our living from the land. Now, she's giving us a start on our life on the lam, not just with skills and knowledge, but with our modest account at the mercantile, too. The credits Malcolm earned from his repair business have enabled us to buy sturdy packs and good hiking boots, some easily portable foodstuffs for emergencies, a water purification kit, and other camping gear that will make life on the road a little easier. When our purchases only took about half our funds, Malcolm wanted to give the rest to Grandmother, but she refused, saying we could call Capshaws if we ever got in a bind, and if not, having the credits there would give us reason to come back. It's comforting to know we have some small amount of currency we can access in a real emergency, but I doubt we'll ever call the mercantile to have it wired to us on the road because that would put the Capshaws at risk.
From chance words Grandmother sometimes let fall, I don't think she's lived here all her life. But she's been here a long time, and learned the knack of surviving in the harsh environment of the desert. There isn't much she doesn't know about the plants and animals that also had to survive here, and she taught us both how to adopt their expertise when it comes to clawing life out of a landscape that gives nothing away for free. And there couldn't have been a better place to learn, for, although the Sonora is the most bountiful desert on Earth, it is still a desert, with all the same dangers as any other, and similar plants and animals in greater or lesser numbers.
Looking back, I'm pleased to realize that I was a fairly quick learner. Malcolm already had some basics from his survival training, but he was humble enough to learn everything else he could. And now at last the day has come when we can set out again feeling reasonably confident that we won't starve to death or die needlessly of thirst.
The cat-carrier has been stashed in a corner for a long time, and Malcolm automatically goes to pick it up. But when he turns around with it, Beans has jumped into Grandmother's lap and glares at him, lashing her tail.
Grandmother doesn't move. She simply watches Beans, and Beans watches Malcolm.
"Beans..." It's almost a wail. I can't help it.
Malcolm upends the carrier and sits on it. He doesn't say anything; just looks.
I should be mortified that the cat has more sense than we do. For God's sake, we can't look after her properly. We have no home, quite possibly no future; for all that no one has rooted us out yet, we're still hunted fugitives. And despite the apparent barrenness of the area, I've discovered that if you know where to look and what to look for, there's enough to eat – definitely enough to keep a cat going fairly handsomely. Not to mention the fact that she's made herself quite at home on Grandmother's lap of an evening.
As T'Pol would say – it's logical. The best possible outcome for all concerned, actually. Grandmother gets company and Beans gets a home, while Malcolm and I are relieved of the burden of caring for her and comforted in the knowledge that she'll be loved and treated well.
But it still takes a couple of minutes before I can nod acceptance of that fact, and when Malcolm comes to me and pulls me into a hug with my face in his chest, I have to gulp a bit before I hug him back. "It's for the best, love," I manage to say, though it's easier to say than believe.
"I know, sweetheart." He strokes my hair. "It's just that we weren't expecting it."
"Cat here got some sense, hey?" Grandmother strokes the arched back, and the shack fills with the familiar sound of purring. "This cat got a whole lotta sense. Ain't gonna slow you down an' be an extra responsibility you don't need. She'll do just fine here fillin' her belly with packrats, whiptails an' geckos."
So we both go over and make a fuss of Beans for the last time, while she purrs up at us from over her comfortably folded white forepaws; and we tell her that we'll come back to see her someday, even if we're not sure we ever will.
"Time you was goin', childern," advises Grandmother. "Remember what I told you: you gotta move out in the desert, you move at dawn an' dusk. Daylight'll fry you an' there are people out there on the watch. Night time's cooler, but them cameras, they look for body heat an' you'll stand out a mile if you ain't hidden."
She's given us the warmest blanket off her bed. We'll need it to wrap ourselves in against the bitter cold of the desert nights if we can't find shelter. We still have our survival blankets from the shuttle, but they're made of reflective material both to keep in body heat and to get the attention of a rescue party. They would be dangerously visible out in the open, but with Grandmother's blanket spread over them, we could probably risk using them. Even so, Malcolm tried to refuse the gift, but she assured us she'll have time to make another before it gets too cold, and now adds with a smile that she'll get on fine with Beans to keep her cosy.
So, we thank her, and walk to the door. Over in the west, the sun is almost below the horizon, a fuzzy orange half-disc wavering in the rising heat. The desert below us is striped with shadows, mostly of saguaro and nopal cactus, and silent save for the very distant yipping of a coyote.
Our target is the railway line some five kilometers away. Originally it had a branch line to the settlement and a way beyond, but the early enthusiasm of track-laying soon gave way to the practicalities of keeping a service running that hadn't a prayer in hell of paying for itself, and so the branch line was torn up (that was where some of the planks in the shack had come from) and the settlement was left high and dry with only a rarely-used road to bring in necessities and the occasional visitor. Anyone who wants the railway these days has to walk to the old junction and hope to sneak aboard while the train's delayed there – there isn't a station for a long, long distance.
"Well, here we go." Malcolm takes my hand.
And we step out towards our future.
If you have been enjoying this story, please leave a review. What do you think the future holds for Liz and Mal? Have Grandmother's lessons adequately prepared them for a wandering life off the grid? How long do you think they'll survive before they stumble into to someone who recognizes them and is willing to turn them in for the reward?