The Dazzle of Day - Softcover

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in Portland on the west side of the Tualatin Hills. She is the author of five novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses, and one collection of stories, Unforseen. Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the PEN West Fiction Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and a Whiting Writers Award; and her short story, “Lambing Season” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West.

The Dazzle of Day 1

Juko

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

ON THAT DAY, the go-down day, Juko Ohasi stood at the head of the weathermast—stood with her feet on the spindly seven-yard and her arms spread wide in the windless glare—looking sunward for her husband.

People who had never gone aloft imagined they might climb to a masthead and see the compass of the windship spread below them, but there was no seeing the whole of it from anywhere on the rigging; this was something every sailmender knew. You had to go out in a small boat, get five or ten kilometers away from it, before it began to be possible to see the whole configuration, the sails entire: Seven carbon-fiber yards thin as thread ringing the torus in concentric circles a kilometer apart, as though the torus had been a pebble dropped in still water; twelve wire-fine spokes radiating from the center in a complex reticulum of torsional support, intersecting the ring-yards and branching, branching again, until the twelve masts were fifty; two hundred panes of reflective vilar—a crowd of sail—each infinitely more tenuous than a soapbubble, each broader than a corn field, bridging the delicate webwork of yards and masts; myriad servos as fine as watchwork trimming the sails in a restless canting with respect to the horizontal axis; and all this immense diaphane supporting the small cumbrous payload of the inhabited torus, a thick-bodied, eight-spoked wheel lying at the center of the sails in a hammock of stays and shrouds along the elliptical plane, like a moon at the eye of its corona.

Among sailmenders, yes, there was a custom, a usual habit, of standing at the outermost tip of a spoke, but not, as other people thought, for a glimpse of the whole architecture turning in an elegant roundelay against the stars. From a boat, at ten kilometers’ distance, or twelve, the Dusty Miller was a vast round mosaic of mirror, a great segmented disk rippling with light and movement; but from the seven-yard, standing up from the head of a mast, what you saw was a billowing field of sailcloth stretching wide and away beyond eye’s reach, as the sea must have stretched away from the eye of the blue-water sailor, and the torus a small purplish atoll at the far horizon. Standing at the head of a mast, people looked, not for the whole, but for what must be the true aspect of a World: something larger than the eye could take in.

Juko Ohasi, standing at the head of the weathermast, only looked for her husband.

She had meant to keep from it. In the sixty-nine days since Bjoro had sailed ahead of them in the Ruby, other people had daily looked sunward from the fields of sail seeking a glimpse of the far off boat, but Juko had not. She and her mother-in-law both were inclined to eat sporadically and to sleep at unlikely hours, and Bjoro inclined to push them toward more orderly habits, so there was a certain narrow pleasure and freedom in his absence, and she always had taken to heart the old axiom that you shouldn’t expect your husband or your wife to carry too much of the weight of your happiness. For sixty-nine days she had felt very clear, very self-contained, unsentimental. She’d been comfortable not missing Bjoro at all, and had understood in a dim, restless way that looking for her husband, or toward him, she might be stricken suddenly with loneliness.

She knew, in any case: From the rigging even the world they steered for was indistinguishable—three hundred days across the measureless distance: a minute light circling the small orange sun amid a turning field of stars, and the little Ruby, circling the world, an infinitesimally small mote of dust. Foolish to look for it—she had not meant to look for it. Had not meant to stand along the weathermast finding a balance in the compass of space, opening her arms as if she were offering something to God or calling up a spell against the night; had not meant to put her feet along the outermost rim of the fluttering array of sails and, spreading her arms to the black, windless firmament, to let in this fierce, this very precise longing for the smell of Bjoro’s wet hair when he came from the bath, for the weight of his hands resting on her shoulders absently as he stood behind her in a crowd or in a queue.

It is the simanas, she thought, and took a kind of mournful satisfaction in it. All of us are gone a little mad these days.

Her mother-in-law, Kristina Veberes, was apt to keep still about a worry until it was well past, and then she liked to complain to everyone how she’d lost sleep over it. She hadn’t spoken a word of misgiving in the sixty-nine days, and wouldn’t be wanting to complain yet with nothing known, no one safe; but Juko, standing at the head of the weathermast staring irresistibly, uselessly sunward, suddenly had in her mind that she and Kristina could get a little drunk tonight and comfort themselves with sarcasm, a habit they were both prone to. People believed the go-down day needed ceremony, and neighbors privately had given over to her two rare, small bottles of wine; she yearned suddenly to be sitting in the bath with her mother-in-law, drinking that wine, listing the son’s, the husband’s manifest faults.

They had an old, mother-daughter friendship, she and Kristina, years older than her marriage to Bjoro. Juko’s own mother and Kristina had been childhood intimates, their families bound together in a tangle of distant kinship, of marriages several generations removed, and Juko had made a second mother of Kristina when her own mother was dead. She had been still married to Humberto in those days, but when their younger son had died and she and Humberto had divorced, she had moved her belongings into Kristina’s house as a daughter returning to her mother’s family. Much of that unmarried year was lost to her, a dull grayness, unremembered. She remembered the Plum Rains—the haloes around the xenon lamps in the wet, humid nights. And Kristina’s son, Bjoro, a man she had known only as a would-be cousin—she remembered his gravity, his tolerant look, and the way that look had become unburdening, a safehold. Before the Plum Rains had come round again, they were married. And their marriage had been knit to that old friendship between Juko and Kristina—an inextricable web of family and familiarity.

On a little release of breath, someone said, “Ha! I’m up-top,” and Juko, who was standing up-top herself, looked round for the other. On the incom the voices always were burry, indistinguishable, and across the great distances of the diaphane the sailmenders were gnats against the burnished vilar, but they had named the two hundred fields of sail as farmers will name their fields of corn, and she recollected some part of the sail chart for this watch: There was Aric Engirt on the Weather-Beater, Al Poreda on the Square-Away, Orval Wyho on the Rock-Bottom. Someone was pulling swiftly out along the dark thread of the spankermast, no telling who that was. The one who was up-top, standing at the head of the skymast—Juko thought it was Marca Negro.

In the earpiece there was a little sound, a sort of grunting disgust, and the person crawling up the spankermast made a quick slow-down, going clockwise onto the sail named the Far-Cry: giving up a race.

“Who’s racing? Is it Juko Ohasi? I seen Sonja go sprinting by me with her eyes fixed on her hands, but you beat her good, eh, Juko?”

Sonja Landsrud was twenty-three or four, quick as a snake, and it had been years since Juko had pulled out a mast on the race, fast enough to beat Sonja Landsrud. She laughed. “No, wasn’t me,” she said. “But I guess I’m not old, then, if somebody’s thinking it could’ve been me.”

“Could be you’re still old, but fast,” somebody said, and people laughed. Then Marca said, “It was me—Marca. I’m the one beat her. I beat Sonja,” and she let a little flourish be in it. I beat her!

“I was one-armed,” Sonja said, a squawk. “Hey, Marko, you saw me, eh? When I came out the hub? banged my wrist a hard one on that damned big fitting that sticks out beside the hatch.”

“Get on, Sonja. Marca beat you, so don’t whine.” That was Marko, maybe, though hard telling on the vague incom.

Sonja said, surprised, “Whining’s what I do,” and that made people laugh again. It was an old aptness of Sonja’s, become a joke she played to: She had always a particular reason for defeat.

Juko’s ear became silent—they kept the incom mostly open for matters to do with the work, and for exigencies—and when the laughter had quieted, the weight of the silence carried her down past the moment of inertia and foolish yearning as she had stood at the vantage of the masthead. She fell softly onto the sail, the field called the Knock-Around, as softly as people, waking, fall back into the middle of their lives.

On the great sails there was silence, aloneness, as there never was in the crowded torus and maybe for this reason menders had a habit of coming together at the junctions where their fields joined—exercising their human connections. At the six-and-weather corner of her field she waited for Al Poreda, thinking he would come across the Square-Away in his usual steady plowman’s pattern, lapping back and forth between the masts, monotonous, prosy. But maybe the Lark had brought his soul to poetry: He was covering the sail today with a loose, indecipherable chasing, a secret hieroglyphic. He kept at it, leaving out the corner, not seeing her there.

“Beauty,” she said, her thumb on the incom, and that brought his head around slowly, looking for her. “Don’t know what design you’re making, but it has beauty,” she told him.

There was distance between them, two or three hundred meters. He let himself come up from the undulating field, until his white exo was a small, drifting brilliance against the absolute blackness of the void. He opened his hands, a slow gesture, open-palmed, and brought his body around to her orientation. “Looking for a pattern,” he said. “Not finding it.” Al Poreda had a grimacing, intent smile, like a man placing himself between fire and the body of his child. The skull of his exo was opaque, but she imagined his mouth letting the words out through that smile.

“No corner in your design, eh? I guess I’ll quit waiting for you.”

He was silent, his arms still open. Then he said in a tender whisper, “Don’t wait,” and let himself down on the sail, on the winding, unknowable pattern. We are all gone a little crazy.

A little retractable ribbon had a house in the waist of her exo, and when she pushed off with her hands against the weathermast the tether trailed her, sliding soundless on its endpin, following the curving track of the seven-yard. The Miller was braking, had been braking for forty years, and now they had come within the inner harbor of the new star their navigation had become an intricate, interminable equation of motion, a continuous contraposing of the outward stream of light, and of the solar wind, of the star’s centripetal attraction, the perturbations of its four small planets, and the old momentum of the torus. The diaphane presented its face, like a blossom, always toward the sun, while the petals of shimmering sailcloth tilted their edges at shallow angles to the elliptical plane: finding their balance and then seeking a new one. Juko bobbled over the Knock-Around like a shorebird above a slow heaving sea.

Where there was a tangle in the halyard, she wrapped her legs over the yard’s thin line and swayed there, picking the little knots in the fine carbon filament. Where an edge of sail was hung up in its rigging she pulled scrupulously at the jam until it was loose again, and with a flat-iron tool pressed out the creases in the cobwebby cloth. Where there was a hole in the sail she soldered the little breach—a dozen atoms expelled in a bead at the tip of the fine mending needle.

The mechanicals were ancient, deteriorating, the sailcloth and the rigging frayed and dilapidated. The Dusty Miller had borne sail for its first fifty years, gathering way in a stately, deliberate acceleration; but for eighty-five years, while the bare toroid coasted through the darkness between the old star and the new, the vast diaphane had been furled, its vanes contracted about the torus with some little hope the folds of mirrored cloth might shield them from the bombardment of cosmic rays. Then in Juko’s childhood the great circle of sails was spread again for this long, difficult braking, and the Maintenance Committee blamed the poor condition of the old sails on the long closure, the reopening.

Juko had heard some people say they thought it was a decay of artistry as much as apparatus. She had learned the sailmender’s art, herself, from people who had, years before, gone up in the hub and hung a field of sail in that high-ceilinged space above the foundry and studied the servos for the spar devices, setting and resetting them, and watching the ways the little mechanical brain turned a halyard wrong or needed a hand to pull a yard down taut—setting and studying and resetting and watching again, figuring out the old art and then climbing out onto the black void, spreading the great sails for the long braking inward toward the new, the unnamed world. Most of those people were dead now, never had seen the new sun. Juko thought if you complained of lost artistry, probably you never had been out on the rigging; she thought people who had never been outside sometimes were inclined to criticize the people who had.

Where the jackmast joined the seven-yard, she went inward along it, girdling the big trapezoid of the Knock-Around, eleven hundred meters along the seven-yard, a thousand meters along the six. The Weather-Beater and the Knock-Around abutted one another along the six-yard and whenever the sail luffed under her, Juko saw Aric Engirt in the glimmering swale, working steadily toward her across the Weather-Beater. When he had made the corner where the jackmast crossed the six, he floated there with his legs wound round the thread of the yard, his face turned toward the little orange bud of the sun. Maybe he was keeping track of Juko from an edge of his eye: In the soundless sky, as she came down to him at the corners of their fields, he broke off his staring and let his body come around to her orientation.

“Phtt,” he said, a wordless complaint, with his thumb shutting out the others on the incom so the sound of it was closed-up, a small-room sound. He made an exaggerated gesture with his shoulders, a slumping, and she remembered he had been sick lately, a cold or a cough, one of the nameless, catholic viruses.

She said, “You should have stayed home, kid, you look still down with the bug.”

He gave her a grimace, a ducking boyish look. “Should’ve. Yeah.” He lifted his gloved hands gently, numbering with his fingers. “There’s six babies in our damn house. People kept wanting to put me to someone’s breast. I’ve got this baby’s face, Rita keeps telling me.”

Juko laughed. It was true, his face was smooth, dimpled; inside the fiberglass skull of the exo, his hair hung down in a thick, childish forelock. “Six! You ought to tell Rita to let you alone.” Juko had not much recollection of this wife—a small woman, dark hair? She remembered they had a new baby, maybe it wa...