2312

Swan flew south and took the Quito elevator up again, and again sat in on the performance of Satyagraha, singing along with the rest of the audience, dancing as an extra when everyone else did, trailing banners at the end of the first act. All the chaos of the repetitive voices crisscrossing in the middle act felt exactly right to her now, true to life. She could punch out those chants like shouting at an enemy. The struggle for peace was more struggle than peace, but now she was energized and into the flow of it.

Up in Bolivar she hurried to catch a ferry going out to meet the Chateau Garden, a big terrarium that she herself had designed when she was young-fool that she had been. This one was a Loire or Thames chateaux landscape, the big boxy stone mansions tastefully scattered about among fields of barley, hops, vineyards, and formal gardens.

It was as green as ever, she found, and looked like one of those horrid virtual game landscapes in which nothing has quite enough texture. Almost every plant in the formal gardens surrounding the great houses was a work of topiary, and not only was this a questionable idea in itself, but these had been left to go wild: the artist had gone out ice-skating on one of the ponds and fallen through the ice and drowned. Now all the whales and otters and tapirs looked as if they were being lifted up by their hair.

In the town itself (slate roofs, wood beams crossing plaster walls in standard pseudotudor) there was a large park, with a big smooth lawn, actually another of the topiarist’s masterpieces: the grass of this lawn was not simply grass, but also very fine alpine meadow grasses, sedges, and mosses, in a dense mix that also included a number of tiny low alpine ground cover flowers, including bilberry, moss campion, aster, and saxifrage, all together creating a millefleur effect that made it like walking over a living Persian carpet. Within this colorful carpet were long strips of pure fine grass, as on putting greens, all running lengthwise to the cylinder. A lawn bowling field, in fact, with about a dozen rinks.

It was winter here, as if they were in Patagonia or New Zealand, and the light from the sunspot on the sunline smeared so that shadows blurred at the edges, and the air looked rusty. Small clouds had bunched around the sunspot, white puffballs glazed pink. The shadows of these clouds dappled the town and its park, and the rolling barley fields and vineyards spread out overhead. Terrarium vertigo washed through Swan for a second as she looked up at them.

There was no Mercury House here, so she took an empty ramada on the edge of the park, under a line of sycamore trees, gorgeous in their stark winter tones. Feeling too full to sit or lie down, she put her travel bag on the square bed and went out for a walk. She stopped for tea in the village, and sitting in the cafe saw that a group of people were going out to the bowling green. She tossed down the last of the tea and went out to watch.

Each strip of putting grass was called a rink, and they were set lengthwise in the cylinder so that the rink would lay flat. That was important, as the Coriolis force was strong enough to push every shot to the right. The balls were asymmetrical as well, as was traditional in the sport; they were squashed spheres, like Saturn or Iapetus, and when thrown they would roll on their biggest circumference like a fat wheel, as long as they were going fast enough, but then might flop onto their side at the end, thus accentuating the fernlike curvature of the roll. It required a neat touch to put a bowl where you wanted it.

A young person approached and asked if she wanted to play a game on one of the empty rinks.

“Yes, thanks.”

The youth picked up a bag of bowls and led her to the farthest empty rink, near the edge of the field. The youth dumped the balls on the exquisite grass and Swan took one of them up. She hefted it along its long diameter; it weighed about a kilo, just as she recalled. It had been a while since she had last played. She went to the mat on which throwers had to stay, and tried to make a simple toss down the middle, on the slow side, hoping the bowl would end up in front of the jack and serve as a blocker to her opponent’s bowls.

It ran down the rink, curving only a bit, then flopped to a halt about where she wanted it. The youth chose a bowl, went to the mat, took a couple of steps forward, then crouched for a final step and the laying of the ball on the sward. Very graceful, and the ball rolled smoothly down the course, running a line that looked to be well to the left of the jack, even headed out of the rink and into the ditch, as out of bounds was called. But then the Coriolis force got its push into it and the ball curved right ever more sharply, tracing a kind of Fibonacci infalling, until it tucked in just behind the jack.