Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon Read Free Book Online Page B

tower of cloud snowy white at its peak, and dark blue-gray below. It would rain this evening; such storms moved inland from the coast every day or so in early summer. In the west, the highlands rose, step by step to distant mountains, but she could not see beyond the forest wall. She had heard about it — the map on the center wall showed the photomosaic made by the survey satellites before the colony was planted.
    When she came into her house, the first puffs of wind before the storm tickled the back of her legs. She glanced back outside. Clouds obscured more than half the sky. Surely the ship, if it was still there, couldn’t see her lights. She didn’t want to spend another evening in the dark; she wanted to cook herself a good supper. She turned the lights on with the same feeling of defiance that had driven her to use the Falares’ shower.
    The storm rumbled, drifting nearer. Ofelia closed the shutters in the bedroom, leaving those in the kitchen open. She cooked with one eye on the outside, waiting for the wind and rain. When it came, her sausages were sizzling with onions and peppers and sliced potatoes; she scooped the hot mix into a fresh round of flatbread, and sat near the kitchen door, listening to the rain in the garden. Soon the darkening evening filled with the sounds of water: the rush of the rain itself, the drumming on the roof, the melodious drip from eaves onto the doors tones, the gurgle of water moving in the house ditches to the drain beyond. Much better than in the forest. Ofelia finished the last of her supper, and rested her back against the doorpost. A fine spray of water brushed her face and arms as the water rebounded from the ground outside. She licked it off her lips: more refreshing than any shower. The rain continued until after dark. Ofelia finally got up, grunting at her stiff back and legs, and moved her pillow into the other bedroom. The slidebug had spent the day making a web in the corner; she smacked it with her shoe — the only good use of a shoe, she told herself happily — and tore down the web. Slidebugs were not venomous, but their clawed legs prickled, and she had no desire to be wakened by it in the dark.
    When she lay down, the bed felt odd. She had slept in this bed when Humberto was alive, but had given it up to Barto and Stefan a year or two later. By the time Stefan died, Barto had considered the room his, and he had invited his first wife Elise to live there. Ofelia had not complained; she had liked Elise, who had died in the second big flood. But then, Barto had married Rosara… so it had been twenty years or more since she’d slept in the big bed. Her body had become used to the narrow one. It took some time tossing and turning and stretching to find her balance in the larger space. Waking to the light filtering through shutters… she stretched luxuriously. Her skin itched slightly, and when she looked it had a faint flush. She would have to wear a shirt again today. But when she looked at her shirts, none of them pleased her. She thought of the houses she’d been in, the things left behind. At Linda’s, there’d been a fringed shawl. Somewhere near there — her mind refused to come up with the name — someone had left a soft blue shirt behind. Or she could make herself a shirt with the leftover fabric in the center.
    Not today. Today she would scavenge again, because she wanted to clear out more of the coolers and find what else useful had been left. She went out into the morning coolness and the fog left behind the rain, no longer worried that someone might see and criticize.
    The damp eased her sunburn; even when she found the blue shirt she remembered, embroidered with little pink flowers, she hesitated to put it on. Inside, she didn’t need it. She wore it like a cape that day, throwing it over her shoulders when she went from house to house and leaving it off inside. In the afternoon, she remembered again that she needed to look for the cattle on the