Free Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon Page B

They deserved to be drowned, to be eaten by monsters, to be marooned on a sandbar with no grass. She had only tried to help them. They were too much like people, that was their problem. Run from help, run to danger. She pulled her feet out of the muck with the determination not to risk herself again for beasts so ungrateful, and splashed back into the village. The next day, more showers, mixed with hot, steamy sun. She thought of writing her feelings about the storm in the log, but she didn’t want to struggle with the words. Yet she wanted to do something; she felt restless. In the center, the bright scraps in the sewing rooms drew her. No one had bothered to decorate the fabric boxes for travel; she found drawers full of decorative braid, beads, fringes, short runs on the fabricator which had, most likely, not been approved by the supervisors. She couldn’t find what she wanted. She looked in the manual for the fabricator. She wanted rain and wind and lightning, clouds and sunlight above them. Noise. Beauty. Destruction. She pushed buttons and set gauges. The fabricator squealed, as it always did on startup, and emitted a wrinkled strand of silvery-gray, followed by crinkly purple material. Ofelia took it out of the fabricator’s bin, and laid it with the other scraps on the tables. Her fingers shifted this shape and that, this color and that, played texture against texture, and matte against glitter.
    By dark she had… something. She wrapped herself in it, unsure. It felt right. Heavy here, light there. Long fringes rippling and tickling her legs. She had sewn metal shapes, rings and arcs, so they rang together. When she looked in the long mirrors, it was no garment she recognized, but it looked the way she had seen it in her mind. She wore it home, in the thick moist dark, and slept in it. That was the only sea-storm of the summer. She added a check of the weather screen to her daily chores. Day by day she tracked two other sea-storms, that came to land hundreds of kilometers away. Her weather returned to the usual late-summer heat and sun, with one or two afternoon rainstorms a week. She cleared the gardens of storm debris, and planned which to use for winter gardens this year. She cut and dried the tomatoes she’d harvested, blanched and froze the beans. Some of the squash would store in the centers cool rooms; some she cut in strips to dry. The peppers, onions, and garlic went on strings, which she hung in the center’s cooler, breezy rooms.
    Then it was time to plant the late garden. For the first time, Ofelia really missed the others, when she struggled with the smallest of the tillers. She had never done the tilling herself; one of the strongest colonists had usually tilled for the whole community, trading that work for credits on the others. She got the little tiller out of the storage shed, but rolling it up the gently sloping lane to her house made her breathless and sweaty; her shoulders and hips hurt already.
    When she turned the machine on, the loud raucous noise hurt her ears, and the machine dug itself a hole. She had to bounce all her weight on the handles to get the spinning tines up, and then she could not push it straight. She had made irregular grooves and holes in about a third of her garden when she quit in disgust. Her hands stung; she hurt all over. Her ears still rang from the noise. When she had rested, she rolled the tiller back down the lane. She would not leave it outside to rust; she had that much justice. But if she could have found the designers of such machines, she would have given them an earful. Why not make a machine that small people could use? A quiet machine? The next day, she took the fork and shovel from the toolshed, and began to turn the soil by hand. It wasn’t so hard, if she went slowly. She would not try to prepare all the gardens; she needed much less space. Then she took the garden cart, and went out into the pastures to pick up dung. Even with all the rain, some of