Lǎojiā

At ten past three in the morning the node in the back room dropped a packet, and Priscilla Chen woke up in her chair.

She had not meant to be in the chair. She had meant to be in the chair for eleven minutes while a rebuild finished, and the rebuild had finished at half past midnight and the machine had sat there being finished for two and a half hours while she slept with her head at an angle that was going to be somebody's problem tomorrow.

The room was cold. The screen was the only light in it. Outside, four floors down and two streets over, somebody was moving crates, because in Tchintián somebody is always moving crates.

She looked at the packet log. One dropped, out of about nine hundred, on the hop from the ridge. That is a good night. That is, in fact, an excellent night, and there was a version of her from fifteen years ago who would have found the sentence one dropped out of nine hundred so unremarkable as to be meaningless, and that version of her had never once had to think about where a packet goes.

She fixed nothing, because nothing was broken. She logged it.

Then she checked the store, and there was a message from Anna, sent at eleven the previous evening, which had spent four hours coming down the island through eleven other people's rooftops to get to her.

the eucalyptus batch is officially the worst thing i have ever made and gertie says i have to keep making it because it is the only one that fixes her cough. thoughts on the ethics of this

Priscilla read it twice with her chin in her hand and typed:

she is lying

i know she is lying

she is lying and you are going to keep making it

i am going to keep making it, Anna wrote back, at twenty past three, because Anna is also awake at twenty past three and neither of them has ever once remarked on this in ten years.

Here is what she does, and it took her about four years to be able to say it out loud without the sentence turning into an apology.

She keeps a node. She keeps the whole Tchintián end of Príngales: eleven rooftops in the quarter, the hop up to the ridge, the store-and-forward that holds the north's mail when the ridge link is down, and the two ancient boxes in the back room that do the holding. When a node in Icod stops speaking, she is one of four people on this island who can work out why.

Before that she trained at a university in Massachusetts that no longer functions in the way it did, and then went to Hangzhou and spent six years building systems of a scale that is now genuinely difficult to describe to anybody, including herself, and then came here for two weeks in the autumn of 2028 to see her grandmother.

She has been here fourteen years.

That is the whole of it and she does not tell it that way, because told that way it is a tragedy, and she has found over fourteen years that people who are told a tragedy will do a face at you, and then you have to manage the face.

So when people ask, she says: I came back for a visit and then it got complicated.

The quarter woke up at five, the way it does, with the big tiendas.

You have to understand what a tienda was here, before, to understand what one is now. Two generations of families out of Qingtian ran shops on this island: the bazares, the everything-shops, four thousand items under one roof at a price nobody could explain, open at hours no Spanish shop had ever been open, stocked entirely from containers that came in through Santa Cruz on a schedule as reliable as tide.

That was the arrangement. That was the whole arrangement, for forty years, and it worked, and it made a quarter.

And then the containers stopped.

Priscilla was here for that. She watched it happen from her grandmother's kitchen: the shelves going down in stages, front to back, the way a tide goes out. First the electronics. Then the plastics. Then the toys, which took longest, because nobody was buying toys. By 2031 the biggest tienda on the street had four aisles of nothing in it and one aisle of rice.

Nobody in her family has ever once called that a disaster in her hearing. What her uncle said, in 2031, in the back of the shop, with his hands flat on the counter, was: "Bueno. ¿Y qué sembramos?"

Fine. So what do we plant?

They plant wheat.

They plant wheat and barley and a little spelt on ninety hectares of terraced valley floor above La Orotava that four families bought together in 2032 for an amount of money that was already becoming a joke, from a man who was leaving and who thought he had done extremely well out of them.

And now, eleven years later, if you eat bread anywhere on the north of this island, it started in that valley.

Priscilla did not do this. She wants that recorded properly, because she has heard the version where she did, and the version where she did is a nicer story and it is not true. She was thirty and a foreigner in her own family's business and she knew about distributed systems.

The people who did it were her uncle, who had run a bazar for twenty-two years; her mother, who had run the accounts of that bazar and turned out to be the person who understood water rights; two men from the Perdomo family who came up and taught them what would grow, out of an old rivalry with somebody else entirely; and her grandmother, who was seventy-six, and who had grown wheat as a girl in Zhejiang, and who walked out onto the first terrace in 2032 and put her hand in the soil and said one word in a dialect nobody younger than sixty in that valley can speak, and then told them, in Spanish, that it would do.

The sowing takes eight days and everybody comes.

That is not sentiment, it is arithmetic: ninety hectares, no working tractor since 2036, two mules, and about forty people who can hold a seed bag. The AI engineer comes. The AI engineer has come every November for ten years, and she is good at it now, which took a while and about which nobody was gentle.

She went up on the Tuesday in the back of the flour truck with six others and a dog.

The valley above La Orotava on a November morning is one of the reasons people used to come to this island and pay money. The cloud sits up on the ridge and does not come down. The terraces run in long soft steps all the way down the valley with the stone walls holding them, walls somebody built by hand a hundred and fifty years ago for bananas and vines and then for nothing at all for thirty years, and now for this. The soil is black. The air smells like turned earth and eucalyptus and, faintly, all day, of the bakery smoke coming up from the town.

Her grandmother is eighty-seven now and does not sow. She sits at the top of the first terrace on a folding chair with a blanket and a thermos and watches, and criticizes, and is correct.

They worked the top terraces in the morning and the light was flat and good.

Priscilla walked her rows with the bag on her hip and her hand going in and out in the rhythm you get after about two seasons and never lose, and her mother worked the row beside her and talked for four hours without requiring an answer, which is a thing her mother has always done and which Priscilla has come to understand is not conversation but company.

At the turn of the ninth row her mother said, without any change of tone:

"Xiaowen, your hands are cold."

Nobody else on this island calls her that. There are perhaps nine people alive who do. Her name at home is not the name on the mesh and not the name Anna uses and not the name she used for six years in Hangzhou, and there is no version of the sentence what is your actual name that she has ever been able to answer in a way that satisfies the person asking.

"They are fine, Mamá."

"They are cold. You sit in that room."

"I sit in that room."

"Mm," said her mother, and went on down the row, and forty minutes later there was a cup of something hot standing on the wall at the end of Priscilla's row, and neither of them said anything about it at all.

At the break they ate on the wall in the sun.

There was bread from their own wheat, which is a sentence that took eleven years to become possible and which nobody in that valley has ever got tired of; and there was papas arrugadas and a green mojo; and there was, because her aunt is a serious person, a pot of chili oil that has been made in this family for four generations and that has migrated, over the last decade, into the cooking of about a third of the north without anybody quite noticing it happen.

Two of the Perdomo men ate with them, and the older one put chili oil on his papas with the air of a man doing something faintly illicit, and Priscilla watched her aunt watch him do it and say nothing and be extremely pleased.

She thought, not for the first time: nobody is ever going to write this down.

There is no record of any of it. There is no census. There is no ledger anywhere that says a bazar family from Qingtian and a cheese family from Vilaflor spent eleven years teaching each other how to feed a coastline, and that it started because somebody had an argument with somebody else in 2032, and that the chili oil went north.

She keeps a network for a living. She knows exactly what an unrecorded thing is worth and exactly how fast it goes.

Anna's messages came in bursts all week, because the ridge link is only good at certain hours in November.

batch fifty-one has a note in it i cannot identify and it is driving me insane. i have narrowed it to something in the carob

fifty-one? what happened to fifty?

we do not speak of fifty

anna

fifty was a learning experience and it is buried behind the shed

And, later that week:

how is the sowing

eight days. we are on five. my back has opinions

is your grandmother sitting on the hill being right about everything

she is sitting on the hill being right about everything

good, Anna wrote. that is the correct use of a grandmother.

They finished the low terraces on the Saturday and there was a thing afterward, because there is always a thing afterward.

It was in the yard of the mill house with the doors open and it went on until about two in the morning and there were perhaps ninety people at it. Somebody had a speaker running off a truck battery. Somebody's cousin had made an enormous quantity of a dish that has no name in either language and that Priscilla's family has been making at the end of the sowing for eleven years and that did not exist before 2033.

Her grandmother stayed until eleven, which is late for her, and held court on a chair by the door and was brought things.

Priscilla sat with her for a while.

They watched the yard. The old woman's Spanish is functional and forty years old and she uses it like a tool she keeps in a drawer; her Qingtian dialect has about four fluent speakers left on this island and three of them were in that yard.

After a while her grandmother said, in the dialect, nodding at the dark shape of the mountain over the mill roof:

"It was clearer at home."

She meant the sky. She says it perhaps twice a year and she has said it since Priscilla was small, and she does not mean it as a complaint; she means it the way you would say a room was bigger than you remembered.

Priscilla said, "Was it?"

"There was nothing in the way." The old woman drank her tea. "You could see the whole of it. Every night, all winter." She made a small gesture, one hand going flat and wide, taking in a sky over a village in Zhejiang in about 1963. "All of it. And nobody looked."

"Nobody looked?"

"They were tired," said her grandmother, with enormous practicality, and that was the end of it.

Priscilla went out into the yard afterward and stood at the edge of it with her cup, in the noise, and looked up.

The mountain had the winter clarity on it. Teide up there black against the stars with the whole of it out, the way it gets in November when the calima has gone and the moon is down and the island has no lights on it to speak of.

She has an inventory, and it runs in three languages, and she has never once thought of this as unusual because she has been doing it since she was small enough to be carried out to look.

There is 参宿 in her grandmother's mouth, and Orión in her mother's, and the belt of it is las tres Marías to everybody on this island and to nobody else in Spain, and it is Orion's Belt in the language she did her degree in. Four names on three stars. She uses whichever one belongs to the person she is standing next to, without deciding to.

Somebody's speaker changed songs behind her. She stood there for a while with her head back.

Then she went in, because her hands were cold.

She got back to Tchintián on the Sunday and slept eleven hours and woke at three in the morning, which is where she lives.

The store had four days of Anna in it.

They talked about the candy and about a decoder Anna is trying to keep running and about whether a particular compression scheme is worth the trouble on a link that bad. They talked, for a while, about the specific and unglamorous problem of the two of them: that they are each maintaining an apparatus that fewer and fewer people can use, for a population that has learned to live without it, and that they are both going to keep doing it, and that neither of them has ever been able to say why in a sentence that survives contact with daylight.

i had a bad week about it in october, Anna typed. i sat in the nook and thought: nobody is coming. there is no one coming who wants this.

and?

and then a woman in guía asked maddy for a bearing size and maddy had it, and i was fine again for about six weeks, which is apparently the dose.

Priscilla laughed out loud, alone, at three in the morning, in a cold room.

Then she typed, before she had decided to:

the observatory drives. up at izaña. the ones you get through stef.

She looked at that for a moment. She deleted it.

Then she typed it again, and added:

how far back do they go

The reply took eleven minutes, which on that link at that hour is nothing at all.

depends on the drive. some of it is instrument logs from the 2010s. why?

And Priscilla sat in front of that question in the dark with her hands around a cold cup, and found that she had absolutely no idea what she wanted to ask next, or why she had asked the first one, or what she would have done with the answer.

She typed:

no reason. is the carob thing solved

THE CAROB THING IS NOT SOLVED

And they went on to something else, and it was, as it always is, four in the morning by the time either of them stopped.

Her grandmother's village is called Qingtian, and the quarter Priscilla lives in is named after it, in Canarian mouths, worn down over forty years into Tchintián ⁓ which is what the whole island calls it now, including everybody who lives there, including her.

She has never seen it.

She has been to Hangzhou, which is a hundred and fifty kilometers from it and might as well be Boston. She had six years to make that trip and there was always a reason. She was going to go in the spring of 2029 and take her grandmother.

There is a word for the place your family is from ⁓ the ancestral house, the home village, the one you belong to whether or not you have ever set foot in it ⁓ and it is lǎojiā, and it is used constantly and casually by people who have never been, and Priscilla has said it her whole life about a valley in Zhejiang she could not pick out of a photograph.

The joke, which she has never once said out loud to anybody because there is nobody to say it to, is that she is now permanently resident, for the rest of her life, in a place she is from.

She got here for a fortnight in 2028 and the door shut, and she is not stranded far from home. She is stranded at it. That is a different thing and it is a smaller thing and she is well aware that it is a smaller thing, and it turns out that the size of a thing has very little to do with how long you lie awake in it.

The wheat came up in the second week of December, the way it does, all at once, so that a valley that was black on the Tuesday was faintly, unmistakably green on the Friday.

Somebody messaged a photograph over the mesh, which at that resolution took most of an hour and was worth it.

Priscilla put it up on the screen in the back room and sat and looked at it for a while, and then she forwarded it north to a woman on a mountain she has never met, with no message attached, because none was needed.

Anna sent back one line, eleven minutes later.

that is the best thing anybody has sent me all year.