The Blossoms That Could Not Be Owned
Story
THE BLOSSOMS THAT COULD NOT BE OWNED
Serrin Root Gallery, dusk in the dry flowering season of primordial Etheros
At the hour the upper bridges became silhouettes, the great flowers opened toward the darkness. Their cups held a gold light that did not warm the hand. It came from living tissue in the petals, fed by the same mineral-bearing roots that held the gallery's walkways against the trees. On clear evenings the light could be seen from the ridge. On this evening, it had brought the veilwings home.
Ruvahl stood at the edge of the mossy path with the carrying basket between his hands. The shell over his shoulders was ridged like the bark behind him; the horns on his head curved back beneath a fall of coarse hair. Beneath the basket's wicker dome lay three pale, wool-wrapped nesting masses. They were not ready to hatch. He had carried them down from an abandoned branch bed because the branch had grown brittle, and the grove's workers disagreed about where their next generation belonged.
A veilwing circled the largest blossom and set down its powdery feet among the filaments. Several more moved overhead, their broad cream wings lifting the cool air in slow pulses. The flying adults had been born here long before the basket arrived. That mattered to Ruvahl. He did not want the small ones in his care to be credited with a miracle they had not performed.
Across the low stone lip, Mesk, a small plated tending creature, drew a pair of careful furrows through the ochre pollen meal. The powder was gathered from fallen flower cups and a few cultivated beds; it would feed the developing larvae after their first emergence. The community had learned not to scrape the living flowers bare. There was a difference between saving a species and making a species dependent on the hand that saved it.
A few paces away, Kelvi, whose feathered crest lifted whenever the night wind passed, bent over a slate. She was recording two things that made the council uneasy: which families paid to tend the grove, and which outsiders collected its medicine-bearing seed after the veilwings had worked. The distant hillside settlements needed the seeds, and the traders who carried them across the dry passes deserved wages. Yet the keepers had seen little return from the good harvests, while a broken bridge rail and a failing branch bed were repaired with their own food money.
"If we move the basket nearer the bright flowers," Kelvi said, "the young may feed before the cold comes. But people will say we have increased the yield, and the buyers will demand more."
Mesk pressed both forelimbs into the powder and looked up. "Then do not promise more. Promise to count."
Ruvahl knew why she spoke so sharply. Last season a collector had called the open grove an unowned place. The collector had paid for labor, but treated the root gallery, its night keepers and the insects as an inexhaustible gift. The claim was not entirely dishonest; the gallery belonged to no household. It was the old common of several villages. A thing could belong to everyone, however, without belonging to the first person who carried it away.
Above them, a cloaked watcher leaned over the narrow bridge. It was Nareh, sent by the outer households to witness the relocation. She could not settle the dispute with a declaration. Her people also depended on seed deliveries, and a new charge at the grove might become another cost on their food and remedies. She had come to hear an account of labor, not a lecture about greed.
For a while nobody spoke. The blossoms shone around their faces. A veilwing settled briefly on a bent branch, then vanished behind a thread of roots. The baskets were still closed. Ruvahl ran his finger across a loose wicker seam and considered how easily a caring gesture could be mistaken for ownership.
At last he offered a modest proposal. The three nesting masses would remain in an open-sided shelter beside the naturally flowering path, not behind a merchant's locked gate. Kelvi would keep a count of new adults and fallen seed, clearly separating observation from guesses. The outer households could contribute labor to repair the broken high bridge instead of paying a new toll immediately. A portion of the first surplus seed would supply the remote ridge clinics at cost; a final agreement about trade proceeds would be made only after the villages had met. If the shelter distorted the moths' movement, they would move it again.
Nareh called down that a labor pledge was something she could bring home, but not something she could sign for everyone. Kelvi wrote that sentence on her slate as carefully as any count. Mesk scraped the feed into a smaller, safer ring. Ruvahl lowered the basket without opening it. Tonight's task was to give the young a place to survive, not to win an argument about who deserved the harvest.
The moths went on carrying pollen from cup to cup. The four watchers could not tell whether the forest was grateful. They knew only that the bridge above them held, the baskets beneath them were dry, and another flowering season would ask the same questions in a different voice. The future had not yet chosen an owner.
