2312

Swan in the Chateau Garden

Swan flew south and took the Quito elevator up again, and again sat in on the performance of Satyagraha, singing along with the rest of the audience, dancing as an extra when everyone else did, trailing banners at the end of the first act. All the chaos of the repetitive voices crisscrossing in the middle act felt exactly right to her now, true to life. She could punch out those chants like shouting at an enemy. The struggle for peace was more struggle than peace, but now she was energized and into the flow of it.

Up in Bolivar she hurried to catch a ferry going out to meet the Chateau Garden, a big terrarium that she herself had designed when she was young—fool that she had been. This one was a Loire or Thames chateaux landscape, the big boxy stone mansions tastefully scattered about among fields of barley, hops, vineyards, and formal gardens.

It was as green as ever, she found, and looked like one of those horrid virtual game landscapes in which nothing has quite enough texture. Almost every plant in the formal gardens surrounding the great houses was a work of topiary, and not only was this a questionable idea in itself, but these had been left to go wild: the artist had gone out ice-skating on one of the ponds and fallen through the ice and drowned. Now all the whales and otters and tapirs looked as if they were being lifted up by their hair.

In the town itself (slate roofs, wood beams crossing plaster walls in standard pseudotudor) there was a large park, with a big smooth lawn, actually another of the topiarist’s masterpieces: the grass of this lawn was not simply grass, but also very fine alpine meadow grasses, sedges, and mosses, in a dense mix that also included a number of tiny low alpine ground cover flowers, including bilberry, moss campion, aster, and saxifrage, all together creating a millefleur effect that made it like walking over a living Persian carpet. Within this colorful carpet were long strips of pure fine grass, as on putting greens, all running lengthwise to the cylinder. A lawn bowling field, in fact, with about a dozen rinks.

It was winter here, as if they were in Patagonia or New Zealand, and the light from the sunspot on the sunline smeared so that shadows blurred at the edges, and the air looked rusty. Small clouds had bunched around the sunspot, white puffballs glazed pink. The shadows of these clouds dappled the town and its park, and the rolling barley fields and vineyards spread out overhead. Terrarium vertigo washed through Swan for a second as she looked up at them.

There was no Mercury House here, so she took an empty ramada on the edge of the park, under a line of sycamore trees, gorgeous in their stark winter tones. Feeling too full to sit or lie down, she put her travel bag on the square bed and went out for a walk. She stopped for tea in the village, and sitting in the café saw that a group of people were going out to the bowling green. She tossed down the last of the tea and went out to watch.

Each strip of putting grass was called a rink, and they were set lengthwise in the cylinder so that the rink would lay flat. That was important, as the Coriolis force was strong enough to push every shot to the right. The balls were asymmetrical as well, as was traditional in the sport; they were squashed spheres, like Saturn or Iapetus, and when thrown they would roll on their biggest circumference like a fat wheel, as long as they were going fast enough, but then might flop onto their side at the end, thus accentuating the fernlike curvature of the roll. It required a neat touch to put a bowl where you wanted it.

A young person approached and asked if she wanted to play a game on one of the empty rinks.

“Yes, thanks.”

The youth picked up a bag of bowls and led her to the farthest empty rink, near the edge of the field. The youth dumped the balls on the exquisite grass and Swan took one of them up. She hefted it along its long diameter; it weighed about a kilo, just as she recalled. It had been a while since she had last played. She went to the mat on which throwers had to stay, and tried to make a simple toss down the middle, on the slow side, hoping the bowl would end up in front of the jack and serve as a blocker to her opponent’s bowls.

It ran down the rink, curving only a bit, then flopped to a halt about where she wanted it. The youth chose a bowl, went to the mat, took a couple of steps forward, then crouched for a final step and the laying of the ball on the sward. Very graceful, and the ball rolled smoothly down the course, running a line that looked to be well to the left of the jack, even headed out of the rink and into the ditch, as out of bounds was called. But then the Coriolis force got its push into it and the ball curved right ever more sharply, tracing a kind of Fibonacci infalling, until it tucked in just behind the jack.

Swan would now have to try to get around her own blocker, or knock it back into the jack, so that hopefully the jack would bounce away. Four bowls per end, and with three to go they were already looking at a crowded space around the jack. Swan considered it for a while, then decided to try to use the bias of the bowl to roll one back against the C-force and see if she could get around her blocker and tap the jack. It would require a very fine touch, and the moment she made the shot she could see that she had put too much on it. “Ah damn,” she said, and was vexed enough to add, “I’m not making any excuses or anything, but I have an excuse for that.”

“Of course. Have you seen that shirt with all the excuses printed on it?”

“They made that shirt by listening to me and writing things down.”

“Ha-ha. Which one this time?”

“Well, I’ve just spent almost a year on Earth. I’m throwing everything long.”

“I bet. What were you doing there?”

“Working on animal stuff.”

“The invasion, you mean?”

“The rewilding.”

“Huh. What was that like?”

“It was interesting.” She didn’t want to talk about it right now, and she suspected the youth knew that and only wanted to distract her. “Your shot.”

“Yes.” The youth’s waist-to-hips ratio was sort of girlish, the shoulder-to-waist-to-ground lengths sort of boyish. Possibly a gynandromorph. The youth’s shot ran almost true and flopped right beside the jack. This end was looking bad for Swan. Her only recourse now was to try to knock her own blocker into the jack and hope the jack went into the ditch, which would make for a dead end. It could be done if she could throw fast and straight on the right heading. She put her little finger on the big circle of the bias, and concentrated on keeping an upright form with a straight follow-through. She rolled, and again on release knew she had missed. “Damn.”

The youth was again amused. “You have to have every finger on it when you let go.”

“Some people do,” she said.

The youth shrugged in reply. Quite young; perhaps thirty years old; a spacer.

“Is this your home?” Swan asked.

“No.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

The youth made a shot, which was a nicely placed blocker that meant it would be harder than ever for Swan to hit the jack with her final roll. The only chance was that same backhand.

She made her last shot and was pleased to see it roll down, take a late turn in, and bang the jack right out of the rink.

“Dead end,” the youth said calmly. Swan nodded.

They played several more ends, and the youth never made a shot that was anything less than superb. Swan lost every time.

“You’re some kind of ringer,” Swan said, feeling irritated.

“But we’re not betting.”

“Lucky for me.” She managed again to knock out the jack.

On they played. Neither seemed in any hurry to do anything else; space voyages could be like that. It felt to Swan like shuffleboard on an Atlantic ocean liner. They were rich in time—they had time to kill. The youth made several shots that were simply perfect. Swan kept throwing long, and losing. It occurred to her that this must be how Virginia Woolf had felt when she played with her husband Leonard, an expert lawn bowler from his years administering Ceylon. Virginia too had lost almost every time. The youth seemed not to care one way or the other. Leonard had probably been much the same. Well, but quite a few people played sports mostly against themselves, their opponents no more than random shifters of the problems they faced in their own performance. Still, this young person began to bother her. The neat picking up of the mat. The final flick of the fingertips at the end of a throw. The exquisite final fern tips of the Coriolised curves.

Only much later that night, as she was lying in her ramada, did it occur to Swan that the pebbles thrown at Terminator had been like a kind of lawn bowling. The thought made her sit up in bed. Set up a mat, launch a bowl—that jack would be covered.