But the women, they’re beyond us, beyond me. Lovely and spry despite the Webbery, despite the children they bear. They wear layered skirts down past their knees and blouses of half a dozen reds. Never anything else. Always red. They’re the heart of the clans. And how much more beautiful they will look wrapped in the imported bows and ribbons and laces contained in the Laurel boxes.
I touch the Sigils on my hands, a bonelike texture. It’s a crude Red circle with an arrow and cross-hatching. It feels right. Eo’s doesn’t. Her hair and eyes may be ours, but she could be one of the Goldbrows we see on the holoCan. She deserves it. Then I see her smack Loran hard on the head as he throws back a mug of Ma’s rice-swill. God, if he’s placing about the pieces, placed her well. I smile. But as I look behind her, my smile fades. Above the leaping dancers, amid the hundred swirling skirts and thumping boots and clapping hands, sways a single skeleton upon the cold, tall gallows. Others do not notice it. To me, it is a shadow, a reminder of my father’s fate.
Though we are diggers, we are not permitted to bury our dead. It is another of the Society’s laws. My father swayed for two months till they cut his skeleton down and ground his bones to dust. I was six but I tried to pull him down the first day. My uncle stopped me. I hated him because he kept me from my father’s body. Later, I came to hate him again because I discovered he was weak: my father died for something, while Uncle Narol lived and drank and squandered his life.
“He’s a mad one, you’ll see someday. Mad and brilliant and noble, Narol’s the best of my brothers,” my father once said.
Now he’s just the last.
I never thought my father would do the Devil’s Dance, what the oldfolk call death by hanging. He was a man of words and peace. But his notion was freedom, laws of our own. His dreams were his weapons. His legacy is the Dancer’s Rebellion. It died with him on the scaffold. Nine men at once doing the Devil’s Dance, kicking and flailing, till only he was left.
It wasn’t much of a rebellion; they thought peaceful protest would convince the Society to increase the food rations. So they performed the Reaping Dance in front of the gravLifts and removed bits of machinery from the drills so that they wouldn’t work. The gambit failed. Only winning the Laurel can get you more food.
It’s on eleven when my uncle sits down with his zither. He eyes me something nasty, drunk as a fool on Yuletide. We don’t share words, though he has a kind one for Eo and she for him. Everyone loves Eo.
It’s when Eo’s mother come over and kisses me on the back of my head and says very loudly, “We heard the news, you golden boy. The Laurel! You are your father’s son,” that my uncle stirs.
“What’s the matter, Uncle?” I ask. “Have gas?”
His nostils flare wide. “You little shiteater!”
He launches himself across the table and soon we’re a muddle of fists and elbows on the ground. He’s big, but I flip him down and pound his nose with my bad hand till Eo’s father and Kieran pull me off. Uncle Narol spits at me. It’s more blood and swill than anything else. Then we’re drinking again at opposite ends of the table. My mother rolls her eyes.
“He’s just bitter he didn’t do a bloodydamn thing to get the Laurel. Shown up is all,” Loran says of his father.
“Bloodydamn coward wouldn’t know how to win the Laurel if it landed in his lap,” I say, scowling.
Eo’s father pats me on the head and sees his daughter fixing my burned hand under the table. I slip my gloves back on. He winks at me.
Eo’s figured out the fuss about the Laurel by the time the Tinpots arrive, but she’s not excited as I’d hoped she’d be. She twists her skirts in her hands and smiles at me. But her smiles are more like grimaces. I don’t understand why she’s so apprehensive. None of the other clans are. Many come to pay their respects; all of the Helldivers do, except Dago. He’s sitting at a group of shiny Gamma tables—the only ones with more food than swill—smoking down a burner.
“Can’t wait for the sod to be eating regular rations,” Loran chuckles. “Dago’s never tasted peasant fare before.”
“Yet somehow he’s thinner than a woman,” Kieran adds.
I laugh along with Loran and push a meager piece of bread to Eo.
“Cheer up,” I tell her. “This is a night for celebrating.”
“I’m not hungry,” she replies.
“Not even if the bread has cinnamon on it?” Soon it will.
She gives me that half smile, as if she knows something I do not.
At twelve, a coterie of Tinpots descend in gravBoots from the Pot. Their armor is shoddy and stained. Most are boys or old men retired from Earth’s wars. But that’s not what matters. They carry their thumpers and scorchers in buckled holsters. I’ve never seen either weapon used. There’s no need. They’ve got the air, the food, the port. We haven’t a scorcher to shoot. Not that Eo wouldn’t like to steal one.
The muscle in her jaw is flexing as she watches the Tinpots float in their gravBoots, now joined by MineMagistrate, Timony cu Podginus, a minute copper-haired man of the Pennies (Copper to be technic).
“Notice, notice. Grubby Rusters!” Ugly Dan calls. Silence falls over the festivities as they float above us. Magistrate Podginus’s gravBoots are substandard things, so he wobbles in the air like a geriatric. More Tinpots descend on a gravLift as Podginus splays open his small, manicured hands.
“Fellow pioneers, how wonderful it is to see your celebrations. I must confess,” he titters, “I have a fondness for the rustic nature of your happiness. Simple drink. Simple fare. Simple dance. Oh, what fine souls you have to be so entertained. Why, I wish I were so entertained. I cannot even find pleasure off-planet in a Pink brothel after a meal of fine ham and pineapple tart these days! How sad for me! How your souls are spoiled. If only I could be like you. But my Color is my Color, and I am cursed as a Copper to live a tedius life of data, bureaucracy, and managment.” He clucks his tongue and his copper curls bounce as his gravBoots shift.
“But to the matter: All Quotas have been met, save by Mu and Chi. As such, they will receive no beefs, milks, spices, hygenics, comforts, or dental aid this month. Oats and substantials only. You understand that the ships from Earth orbit can only bring so many supplies to the colonies. Valuable resources! And we must give them to those who perform. Perhaps next quarter, Mu and Chi, you will dally less!”