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Posts Tagged ‘Marideth Sisco’

Chapter Eighteen: Growing Pains

Posted in Book One, Worlds End, Seed Mother, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »

World’s End
Book One of The Seed Mother

Chapter Eighteen: Growing Pains

By the fifth year of the Change, the settled territories had established tentative boundaries and developed some idea of how both regional and national governments might work. Populations were still isolated from one another by distance and modes of transportation and when faced with limits and losses to their base of skills and resources, their neighbors were too few and too far away to be counted on. They were coping with the loss of continuity that comes from a long, shared history as they struggled to survive in the radically changed world they now faced.

As a result, their visions of community seldom matched perfectly with folks in other territories. Those who had established locally-chosen rules based on old world notions sometimes struggled to come to a mutual understanding with other groups who had different notions. While most clung to some semblance of democratic rule, many added creative variations that spoke to their particular circumstances and populations but were not easily translatable to people in other circumstances. The Hoppers maintained a peaceful understanding with the people of Falling Spring regarding recreational use of smokable hemp, for instance. But in territories who viewed their use of hemp as an evil drug, it was a different story. When interactions went badly, the Brothers came, freed them from arrest, relieved them of what they saw as a commercial product and just sent them home. It was hard work, but in most cases practical solutions were found that enabled groups to form agreements, either by making adjustments to the rules or by nudging some elements of a population to seek a home with those who were more likely to agree with them.

As the regions were established, those who called themselves The Religious and were called Lidges by others at first sought to lay claim to the entire western third of the island of Ozarkia – from the southern harbor at Theo to the farthest reaches of the uninhabited north. Unfortunately for them, others had already spoken for the parts of that region where pre-Change settlements survived or new ones had become established. Those others were willing to organize enough to form their own regional government but wanted nothing to do with the rigid theocracy adopted by their southern brethren. Among those who asked to be “included out” were a pair of enclaves that held inholdings both east and west of the once thriving but now struggling village of Ava. One was a women’s land trust, mostly lesbian. The other was a clan of avowed anarchists who wanted little association with outsiders, and, in fact, had vowed to reject any form of government that sought to rule them. The small trading post that had sprung up there at the Ava crossroads, composed mostly of a couple of extended families of B’hai, supported and made a connection with both communities, which were the largest source of the post’s livelihood. The resulting scattered community took a vow of kindness toward all who showed them respect, and called it good. They were willing to be helpful and get along, and wished neither to cause trouble nor to deal with the troubles of others, they said.

A dozen miles north, on a high ridge that overlooked the western ocean, more settlers gathered and formed a town from the survivors of the vanished western lands, coming to ground in the remains of the old village of Mansfield. The ragged settlement swiftly grew into a thriving, diverse community that called itself Hilltop. Its success was thought to lie in its location, where the remains of the old east-west highway crossed a north-south highway that once had run all the way from the new south coast far into the northern wilderness, where no one had come from and no one had yet gone – or if they had, they either never came back or weren’t talking about it. The town made its living primarily as a stop-off on the road to other lands, including the coastal settlements that had grown up adjacent to Amish farmland. Travel between those lands, however, required the building of new roads, because the Mansfield Fault had shifted during the cataclysm, leaving towering bluffs in place of the road west. Catering to travelers, Hilltop became a handy location for inns, hotels, and stores of various kinds.
The existence of settled lands at the end of the north road was rumored, but few had traveled very far in that direction. Civilized territory stopped at the abode of the metal miners and landfill scavengers, among them the blond men who passed through Falling Spring on their way between the territories selling their repurposed wares. As their work was hard and dangerous and involved mostly the repurposing of metal, they had taken to calling themselves the Ragtags, and mostly kept apart from others except when they joined the traders in their now twice yearly caravans.

Across the territories, such people as had stayed on or come back to their family holdings were assumed to have undisputed claim to them, while those places that remained abandoned for the entirety of years since the change could be claimed by others seeking land on which to settle.

Some of the logical changes in the overall culture of this new nation could have been predicted by anyone with any training in sociology, or so observed Steven in a journal he was keeping to track the newly forming history of the New World’s beginnings. The Society of Brothers, for instance, had gotten its start as part of a natural process kindled during that first long winter at Glen’s Cave. Glen himself, Steven noted, had come to these hills some years before the Change, seeking the life of a hermit, trying to escape the press of civilization. But the collapse of that civilization had driven him back out into the world, first to explore and then to look for what he could do to help those who survived. The formation of the Brothers had been one major result.

By way of the town meetings, the family dinner gatherings and a host of groups of like-minded folks who formed relationships in families and other alliances, the people of Mumbros learned to heal by talking through their sufferings and triumphs, until they found resolutions. Simply speaking, he said, they honored one another and came to peace. Instead of arguing over what to do in a new circumstance, they thought through the problems as they arose and dealt with them. Over time, and sooner than many would have predicted, a new vision of order, choice, responsibility, and accountability was brought into being at Falling Spring. The emerging vision was a surprise to many.

Somewhere in the fourth year, Steven asked Moira if she was happy at how the community was developing. “I suppose a good part of our emerging world view, as well as our ability to accept changes, was carved out by the hardships of the past. We realized that to survive we had to get along with one another. For a long time we thought we were just one tiny group among the few surviving remnants of humanity. Now that remnant has become a thriving, growing culture. We are now vigorously involved in the work of starting anew. I’m proud of how far we’ve come in such a short span of time.”

Actually, Steven observed, the thing that had finally tipped the balance and had brought the territories together to forge a council with jurisdiction over the whole nation was the problem of random groups and individuals laying exclusive claim to resources that were actually owned by none but vital to all. It was one thing for a territory to try laying claim to a large chunk of what they thought to be abandoned land for their potential future use, as the Lidges had attempted. It was quite another to simply hijack a resource vital to the nation and hold it for ransom.

It had started with coinage. Needing a common medium of currency the council had managed to settle on a currency of coinage based on the dollar. Since there was as yet no way yet to replicate paper currency, an agreement was reached to assign new value to the metal coinage they could garner, and so when bank vaults were breached, making coin more readily available, the territories once again had a common medium of exchange. The problem that developed was one of scalping – there were some few in isolated areas who had seized not just coins but other vital resources, then jacking up prices to the point of outright banditry. A shipment of salt was stolen. Several caves containing saltpeter were stripped of the substance, which was vital to the curing of meat. So agreements were enacted that limited holdings, establishing reasonable property rights, and defining those things that were to be considered as “community property, in the national interest.” Because Mumbrosans and the Burenites to the east were the most prosperous and therefore the most intent on fair dealings with their neighbors, Steven wrote, they were the ones who drove the need for a central authority. The Council stepped into that space and a national government, casual as it was, came into being. During that same period a separate eastern contingent of the Brothers was formed, based in Popular and given a mandate to enforce order and fair play in those areas and beyond.

Moira’s extended family constituted the largest and most influential group of scientists, and so, as promised at that first conference on education, Mumbros was where scientists and students of the sciences gathered for advanced studies. Soon, enough students had completed advanced degrees that in the autumn of the fourth year the University of The Plains established an Institute for Graduate Studies at Falling Spring.

To the surprise of some but not all, one group at the institute immediately put its focus on studying the apparently increasing mental capacities and psychic abilities of the sentient beings, not all of them humans. As they established parameters to monitor and record their findings, which echoed the suspicions and beliefs the first family had voiced more than a year earlier, the researchers verified observations that without any visible cause or pattern, individuals in all the sentient species were developing some unique and identifiable abilities.

Among humans, some had an uncanny ability to track animals, others could find their way through the wilderness without a map or compass, still others could seek out and find salvage, a few seemed to be able to heal minor physical injuries solely through touch. These new abilities were no respecters of gender or cultural roles and so even as more than a few of the men elected to become or remain homebodies, one of the women, then two, then five, had chosen and insisted upon a place among the Brothers and had been accepted after demonstrating their own suitable skills. Some abilities, on the other hand, had been identified as disabilities, when a few sad individuals found themselves trapped by emotional actions and reactions they were unable to control, and had to be cared for gently by the community at large. Results of those studies, as Steven noted, were kept confidential, although observations by the community as a whole became fireside tales, soon developing into a colorful mythology discussed widely, especially in evenings at the Inn.

For all their successes over the past five years in preserving knowledge and skills, many more ordinary talents were still in short supply, and people’s abilities and skills of all kinds became more highly valued. Crafters, especially carvers, sculptors, and fiber artists, began offering apprenticeships so those skills could be passed into younger hands. Even Lon Brixey began encouraging those interested in the brewing, winemaking and the distilling of spirits to sharpen and pass on their skills, encouraging more than one young fancier of chemistry to spend an apprenticeship at Grove Hill. His timing was excellent, because another small upriver settlement in a long valley suited for farming had been gifted with a variety of nursery starts including bundles of fruit tree scions that had been heeled in by Tish and some helpers as she unloaded her cart of rare and precious plant starts. After five years of establishing orchards and vineyards, that settlement was able to supply Falling Spring and other communities with such luxuries as cherries, plums and the first of the bamboo harvests. And, to Lon’s delight, they were just now coming into a sizable harvest of wine grapes. “Go! Do the work! Come back a vintner or a distiller!” He had shouted repeatedly at the students nursing an after-class pint of ale at the Inn. And some of them did.

Another cultural shift underway was the announcement by a few brave men that while they intended to fulfill their duties of maintaining and adding to the still fragile gene pool, they preferred as their domestic companions, as did Toby and Rickard, the company of other men. A few women expressed similar, if opposite, inclinations. No one balked at either notion, though there was some small but heated discussion in some quarters about the possible rifts in the fabric of culture if people started stepping outside their more “natural” roles. That assertion was laughed into silence by a community of people that was beginning to get a new sense of itself. That they were all still human, Moira, as their leader, never doubted. But they were beginning to be something more as well. Enlightened, perhaps. Open, certainly.

But government, even on the village level, was not as simple as some might think, Moira observed after a particularly painful discussion among the midwives that spring. For unknown reasons, one and then a second newborn had arrived suffering serious conditions that had begun inside the womb and that would make life difficult if not impossible to sustain. The conditions were dissimilar: one frail little girl was born with a malformed and barely functional heart; the other infant, a boy, arrived looking perfect, but with lungs that had never developed properly. His every breath was a gasp, and treatment options were simply non-existent for either child. Ellen and Moira had sat with Alice, holding her hands each time as she weighed her choices: to let them suffer their slow way to a pain-filled, frightening end, or to take their lives in her hands and end them herself. And there was a second question: Should they make those difficult decisions on their own, or let the parents decide. As it turned out, whether by fate or the kindness of the gods, neither of those awful decisions came to them. The girl, born to a couple from the bus people, was at her mother’s breast feebly trying to nurse when she gave a sudden shudder and just stopped. Her parents had been prepared for that possibility from the first, and took it in stride, grieving but understanding that their tiny child had been spared much unnecessary pain by that outcome.

The second child, born to free agents Rae Jean Compton and Arthur Slocum, was still gasping when Alice came into the birthing room just off the infirmary. Rae Jean had been ensconced there holding the infant, whom she’d named Amos, for most of the day once the birthing was ended. She was patting him, crooning to him, stimulating his arms and legs, hoping against hope that his breathing would improve. It would not, but she didn’t believe that just now. Alice stepped up beside the bed and put her hand on Rae Jean’s forehead.

“You have to get some rest for yourself, honey,” she said. “I can hold him for a little bit while you nap some.” She took up the infant, said “Hello, little Amos,” and wrapped him in a small blanket she’d heated on the stove in the next room. She sat down in a rocking chair next to the bed and began her vigil.

Rae Jean fell asleep almost at once, and Alice had almost dozed off as well when she began detecting a change in the raspy breathing coming from the small bundle. It was slowing. She looked across at Rae Jean who looked back, her eyes filling with tears. But when Alice offered to hand the infant back to his mother, she shook her head. “Don’t disturb him,” she said.

Slower and slower came the little gasps, until finally he seemed to take in a long, unhurried breath followed by a deep sigh, and the tiny newcomer fell into that deepest of sleeps and was gone. “Sweet dreams, little Amos,” Alice whispered. “Sweet dreams.”

Arthur was summoned from his post outside and the parents wept together, while Alice sought Moira in the greenhouse nearby.

“It’s over,” she said. When Moira gave her a questioning look, she shook her head. “He went on his own. I guess he just wanted to come in and look around a bit. He may be back sometime.”

“If love has its way,” Moira answered.

That night at the family’s supper, medical choices, midwifery and childbearing were high on the agenda of topics at table.

“Couldn’t we have done anything at all,” Steven asked, deep in sorrow at the news.

“If we had any kind of technological sophistication,” Ellen began, but Moira overrode her comment.

“But we don’t. And we won’t. And everything that could be done was done. And at some point we’re just going to have to resign ourselves to the fact that in earlier times it was the midwife’s job not only to catch the baby and see to the birth, arranging the tools, educating the parents, it was also her job to recognize when the fetus or the newborn just wasn’t viable. We’re back to that point. We don’t have a neonatal center. We won’t have one in our lifetime, perhaps many lifetimes. All we have here are our skills and our training and our compassion. If reinforcements were coming, they would already be here. It’s on us. The hard stuff should always go to those who are able to deal with it. There’s no one to hand it off to. It’s. On. Us.” Dinner went on from there, but mostly in silence.

This year at Beltane everyone, even the staunchest Christians, joined in the raucous and rowdy celebration of survival, fruitfulness, and, for the first time, real hope for the future. Due partly to the continued separation of the sexes during the winter months for the first years of what had come to be called “new time,” and partly to the continuing evolution of consciousness, there came to be more and more unions of varying degrees of intimacy and variety. An overriding consciousness of the fragility of the gene pool grew into an acceptance of what came to be called pan-families, with women bearing children by more than one father, and men fathering children by several mothers. Same-sex unions were accepted, but refusal to bear or to father children was frowned upon unless there were health or gender identity issues involved. Households formed of small groups of individuals who felt affinities for one another and shared relationships of varying intimacy within them. Likewise, extended families tended to occupy one or adjoining households for extended periods. The only taboos enforced strongly were those against incest, battery, and the abuse of the helpless — anyone caught stepping over those lines was simply shunned and sent into the wilderness to fend for themselves, often with a tattoo applied to their foreheads that proclaimed them a danger to others. It was a lesson that needed little reinforcement after being demonstrated a couple of times.

As for the Brothers, there came a time when their shelter and headquarters turned into a retreat and training center. In this fifth year, the fields, cropland and commodities for export reached a sustainable level. With hunger no longer an ever present danger, the men who had been wintering in the north finally came home for good.

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