Woman on the Edge of Time

The room they entered took up half the dome and was filled with big tables seating perhaps fifteen at each, mostly dressed in the ordinary work clothes that Luciente wore, the children in small versions. The pants, the shirts, the occasional overalls or tunics came in almost every color she could name, many faded with washing and age, although the fabrics seemed to hold up. Everybody looked to be talking at once, yet it wasn’t noisy. The scene was livelier than institutional feeding usually made for. A child was climbing on a bench to tell a story, waving both arms. At the far end a man with a mustache was weeping openly into his soup and all about him people were patting his shoulders and making a big fuss. People were arguing heatedly, laughing and telling jokes, and a child was singing loudly at the table nearest the door. Really, this could be a dining room in a madhouse, the way people sat naked with their emotions pouring out, but there was a strong energy level here. The pulse of the room was positive but a little overwhelming. She felt buffeted. Why wasn’t it noisier? Something absorbed the sound, muted the voices shouting and babbling, the scrapes of melody and laughter, the calls, the clatter of dishes and cutlery, the scraping of chairs on the floor—made of plain old-fashioned wood, as far as she could tell. Unless it was all some clevar imitation? She could not believe how many things they seemed to make out of wood. Some panels in the wall-ceiling of the dome were transparent and some were translucent, although from the outside she had not seen any difference.

“No reason to look in. The fooder has to be well soundproofed, or on party nights, at festivals, nobody who didn’t want to carry on would be able to sleep. The panes with the blue edge come out. We get the breeze from the river—when it gets too hot, we take the panels out.” Luciente was heading for a table on the far side, where everyone except the littlest child stopped eating to watch them approach. “Some you can see through and some not, because some of us like to feel closed in while we eat and some—like me—want to see everything. The fooder is a home for all of us. A warm spot.”

On the translucent panels designs had been painted or baked in—she could not tell—in a wild variety of styles and levels of competence, ranging from sophisticated abstracts, landscapes, and portraits to what must be children’s drawings. “Where did the art come from?”

Luciente looked surprised. “The walls? Why, from us—or some of us. I don’t fiddle with it. I’m one of the sixty percent who can’t. We find all the arts fall out in a forty/sixty ratio in the population—doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re talking about dancing or composing or sculpting. Same curve. Me myself, I drum magnificently!”

Like a child! She could not imagine any woman of the age they must share saying in El Barrio or anyplace else she had lived, “Me myself, I drum magnificently!” Indeed, they were like children, all in unisex rompers, sitting at their long kindergarten tables eating big plates of food and making jokes. “I can see wanting to look at your own child’s drawing. But wouldn’t other people get tired of it?”

They had reached the table through a sea of spicy odors that touched her stomach to life. Two places were vacant, set with handsome heavy pottery dishes in earth colors, glass tumblers on the heavy side, and cutlery of a smooth substance that was neither silver nor stainless steel and perhaps not even metal. Someone—slender, young—leaped up and hugged Luciente, held out his?/her? arms to her, checked the gesture, and smiled a brilliant welcome. “You got through! Wait till everybody hears about this!”

“Never mind. Did you save us lunch? I’m thinning by the second,” Luciente said, hugging the youth back.

They were literally patted into their seats and she found herself cramped with nervousness. Touching and caressing, hugging and fingering, they handled each other constantly. In a way it reminded her again of her childhood, when every emotion seemed to find a physical outlet, when both love and punishment had been expressed directly on her skin.

Large platters of food passed from hand to hand: a corn-bread of coarse-grained meal with a custard layer and a crusty, wheaty top; butter not in a bar but a mound, pale, sweet and creamy; honey in an open pitcher, dark with a heady flavor. The soup was thick with marrow beans, carrots, pale greens she could not identify, rich in the mouth with a touch of curry. In the salad were greens only and scallions and herbs, yet it was piquant, of many leaves blended with an oil tasting of nuts and a vinegar with a taste of … sage? Good food, good in the mouth and stomach. Pleasant food.

Luciente was saying everyone’s name, leaving her battered. Nobody seemed to have more than one. “Don’t you have last names?”