Chapter 45

And so a period of days ensued in which little of note seemed to happen, as is often the case when the most potent of life’s forces are at work, though beneath the surface and not yet brought to fruition. William became a more frequent visitor, and often took long walks with Sylviana. Kalus, feeling a genuine desire to work and do his share, as well as needing something to distract him, began to work the fields with Jim Smith, the botanist, his only real friend among the colonists. He still spoke to Kataya, but had told her that for a time it was best they keep some distance between them, and she had not objected. She understood, and kept a warm secret of the fact that her menstrual cycle was now a week overdue.

Under other circumstances, Kalus might have fallen in love with the rigors and lessons of farming, which taught patience and perseverance, and returned the most beautiful and honest of rewards: Life itself. When Smith told him that by the year 2000 the smaller, family farms of America were largely a thing of the past, he thought it a greater tragedy than almost any he had heard of. And unknowingly, as Smith continued to tell him of his own childhood on the Indiana farm, of his family’s hardships and eventual ruin, Kalus weaved the themes of the story in and out of his own.

Because as he toiled, he too felt the creeping sense of fatalism that told him all was lost, and the meaning gone out of his life. He too felt events pushing toward some dark and bitter climax over which he seemed to have little control. All this though he raged, and cursed, and worked harder still. Because Sylviana would not let him near her, and heeded none of his warnings.

So he worked, and waited, and prayed to the wind which knew could not hear. While the woman-child, oblivious, pursued the treacherous shadow of revenge.

It should be said in her defense that Sylviana had not stopped loving him. Hers, rather, was a classic case of one who has struggled with the help of another to achieve some desperate goal, but whom, upon attaining it, felt that he or she no longer needed the life partner who had been a pillar of love and support throughout: that she was now free to choose a more appropriate mate for her elevated status, and leave the other to get on as they would. As if that made it any better. Lastly, that if she had been herself she would have wished him no harm, whatever he had done to hurt her.

But her emotions, too (or so she told herself), were in a violent state of flux. She felt as if she had been the one struck across the face, betrayed and unjustly punished for simply following the inevitable course of events. She had never been an evil person, and was not now.

But a sin of omission can be every bit as deadly, and the venomous spider does not stop to ask the nature of its victim before it bites, a soft sting that is hardly felt, until the poison starts to work. Neither of them had realized the gift their isolation and struggle had been, or how much more complicated love becomes when lives are sheltered, and hearts confronted by a baffling array of choices. Perhaps that was why, as Smith had remarked to Kalus, the well-off never seemed to be much in love, but only to play at life. His love with Sylviana had been simple and direct, a beautiful and necessary outgrowth of their world. Now their reality had been altered, and something precious lost.