All of us are gone a little mad these days. It is the simanas, she thought, and took a kind of mournful satisfaction in 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.
Foolish to look for it-she had not meant to look for it. 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. 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. For sixty-nine days she had felt very clear, very self-contained, unsentimental. 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. 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. Juko Ohasi, standing at the head of the weathermast, only looked for her husband. 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. 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. 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.Īmong 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. 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. 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. Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,Ĭeaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
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