Woman on the Edge of Time

“Why should I be scared? Who says I’m scared? You’ll see.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Skip.” She touched his hand.

He jerked back as if she had burned it. “Don’t try to get around me. Now I know better. Give and take, and then it’s all taken.”

Jackrabbit was showing her a bunch of … what? Dream images? Sculptures in light? Shapes that reshaped themselves into other shapes? She felt nervous looking at them with the person who made them, the artist, right there making it happen. She was afraid she wouldn’t seem appreciative or wouldn’t say the right things or look the right way, and he’d think she was stupid. But there at her elbow was Luciente, eating white grapes from a woven basket and grunting rough enjoyment as if it were just a TV program. If she tried to think about what the images were supposed to mean, she felt miserable. But if she looked with her eyes open and let them happen to her, she could not help getting drawn in.

The holi he was showing now had no words, no story, unlike the one he’d done with Bolivar. It was all images having something to do with the ocean and with sex and with power—not power over people, but natural power, energy. Boundaries dissolving. The sea rising, smashing into the land. Under a clear cold blue sky a sea lashed itself into foam and sprang at the shore. Waves with teeth that glinted and hair that tangled and tossed roiled over itself. Wave breaking over wave showed dark bellies arching before they crashed down in froth and slid on the sand spent and hissed dribbling back.

Jackrabbit’s workshop stood near the mill, near enough to hear the wheel turning. There the river ground grains and corn and operated a series of pumps. Four times a day a tidal clock swung the wheel mechanism about so that it was always fixed correctly in the flow of waters. When Jackrabbit did not opaque the window and use only the sliding skylight, ripples danced on his high ceiling. Always, he told her, he could hear the mill wheel, the waves slapping the shore just underneath. The workshop was built out some feet over the river, and the side facing the water had a narrow porch.

“Jackrabbit already has two students,” Luciente said, leaning on the railing outside the open door while Connie looked through the drawings and prints Jackrabbit started to show her next.

“Deborah and Orion aren’t pleased I’m going on defense. They’ve been slinging about it all week,” Jackrabbit complained, knotting his hand in his curly hair.

“Rough!” Luciente said flatly. “They knew when they chose you you hadn’t fulfilled defense. They didn’t have to wait for you as teacher. Let them do service work for sixmonth.”

“Their slinging saddens me,” Jackrabbit said, idly trying to tickle Connie in the ribs as she turned over the stiff sheets. “Rhythm of my life crosscutting rhythms of theirs. They feel they’re growing and want to fly faster.”

“Can’t you work alone? You didn’t always study with a teacher.” Luciente kicked off her shoes and sat with her bare feet hanging off the porch, but she could not quite reach the water.

“Why do you have to go on defense?” Connie turned from the pages. “I can’t look anymore. I’m sorry—I just can’t take more in.”

“But I have to get defending out of the way before I start mothering. It’d be stupid to do it the other way, I grasp that.”

“Your society doesn’t think that much of art and artists and all that, do you?” Connie looked away from the radiant male nude that hung on the far wall, along with twenty other paintings, drawings, prints, whatever. A naked male body hung like that—doubly hung—embarrassed her. It did not seem like something she should stare at, yet the colors glowed, the flesh shone from within. She kept glancing at it, nervously, from the corner of her eye. It was beautiful when it should not have been—like Martin, her first husband. She could not imagine him permitting anyone to paint him that way, yet if someone with talent had, his flesh would have shone so. It was neither Jackrabbit nor Bolivar. Unless Bolivar seven years younger with a bushy beard?

Luciente turned, propped her back against a post of the railing. “Why do you say that, Connie love? The great majority of us pursue some art, and sometimes more than one.”

“But that’s like amateur stuff. I mean, real artists. Like Jackrabbit. I don’t know anything, but I can see it’s for real. Yet he still has to work in the fields and go to the army and cook and all that.”

Luciente grinned “But I myself am a real geneticist and I have to defend and dig potatoes and cook and all that. I also eat and make political choices and rely on those in arms to defend me—as does Jackrabbit. Zo?”

“I comprend,” Jackrabbit said with an airy wave. “In Connie’s time it was thought some people who were good at some things, like a couple of the arts and sciences, should do nothing else.”

“That must have made them a little stupid,” Luciente said. “A little simple—you grasp? And self-important!”