Storymania - T´Ayl Ever-Cold by Fermin Moreno Gonzalez

T´Ayl Ever-Cold
Fermin Moreno Gonzalez

Everybody knows T´ayl Ever-Cold and T´elm Who-is-Waiting´s story. All the Earths and all the Folks. The story keeps on coming out of the oldest Underpeople´s lips in rings of youngsters gathered around the nocturne bonfire. It doesn´t need these contrivances to be what it is -lovely and sad.

T´ayl loved T´elm. T´elm loved T´ayl. It took him two hundred years to decide to tell her it, for none of them had wished to show their feelings up till then too very clearly. T´ayl united T´elm then almost too very quickly, after three years of this. There is no need to explain that they were Underpeople derived from a turtle.
T´elm was a crop supervisor. He would watch over the proper growth of native plants from a thousand worlds whick took root in huge fields in the outskirsts of Terraport. He was in great demand. He even had gone to train others like him under Chinese Venus´hot sun. And he had come back. Together with T´ayl.
T´ayl would watch over the proper growth of high stock children, even Instrumentality second-in-command´s offspring. Full-time. One by one. Observing and registering the subtle changes in their morphology, their behaviour, their loves and hates year after year, always present, until the birds would leave the nest, and so would she. It wouldn´t have a better observer were she human.
One or two centuries more, and she would give T´elm the son both wanted. Without the Baking Machine having no say in it. Or so they hoped for it.
The Baking Machine would mould Underpeople from Beasts, and it always had kept Underpeople from being born from other Underpeople. Only when there was some trouble with the Baking Machine or skiller workers could be obtained more precisely in the ancient manner, the Instrumentality issued permits, as rare and valuable as a Mankind woman of catlike irides. T´ayl would never get the permit. Her dossier, buried into the dim Instrumentality archive read -to be used almost perennially. They didn´t need anything else like her. For a long while. The couple´s patience had died before being born. One can wait forever, but only if that which you are expecting can be achieved. That´s the way it was even for two turtles.

Little Taddy was crying bitterly in his cot. T´ayl watched. She wasn´t a nannny, although she got along with them. She saw his nursemaid coming. O´lvido appeared wheezing in the nursery. She was an old plump she-bear laden with affection.
"Keep quiet, mi little boy," the she-bear whispered, wrapping up Tadeus in her big motherly arms. "Mummy O´lvido is here for you to sleep, darling."
"Thanks, O´lvido," T´ayl tongued. Frequently she felt an urge to rock that little human life that was Tadeus on her bosom. Luckily, the she-bear was always ready to go to T´ayl´s aid.
"There´s no reason you should thank me. This is mi duty," tongued O´lvido in his turn, a soft smile lighting up her coarse rostrum, while she placed the boy in his saddle, now programmed to hover and rock him to and fro in weightlessness and was coming to the kitchen to answer the whirr of the interphone. T´ayl oughtn´t to cease to pay attention. He was Tadeus´ chief observer, and her substitute would be long in coming yet.
Shortly after T´ayl heard T´elm opening up the entrance and greeting O´lvido.
"You come early. T´ayl is still working. It must be something important. Or you just can´t bear without seeing her, hey?" the she-bear smiled.
T´elm didn´t change his look, but didn´t made a face either. O´lvido took up her chores again leaving them alone.
T´ayl sensed his eyes fixing on Tadeus, eyeing the boy peacebly greedily. She decided to speak first.
"Is he lovely, isn´t he? Some day we´ll have one like this one, don´t you worry."
"I didn´t come to talk to you about that," he defended himself, turning away his eyes one moment towards the large window and the recumbent city below his feet. "I have to set out for a newly-settled world. The crops are getting spoiled and the colonists don´t know why. I must see them to grow, and teach others how to do it by their own. The sailplane will weigh anchor within three days.
"So-?" she encouraged him.
"I can´t leave without you. Not without knowing that our son is dwelling into you."
"It´s impossible, T´elm, and you know it."
"Do you know what I´ll be exposed to? Maybe I will die in space. My capsule could be smashed up, or I even can rot into it if the navigator takes too much to come to destination, and our son would never be."
T´ayl was distressed to hear this and to have to contradict him, for she longed for that son even more than him.
"They´ll take care. They are interested in. Besides sailplanes are safer than in former times."
"At any rate, you will have to wait for me years and years. Perhaps I´ll even have to stay on if the colonists don´t learn enough."
"They´ll do, my dear, and quickly if you are your instructor. And I´ll be waiting for you the time it is necessary."
"Till the end of time?"
"Till the end of time," T´ayl repeated, as only a person born from a turtle could repeat it. T´elm seemed to relax.
"Then I´ll go away, on one condition."
"Well?" T´ayl took him by the hand.
"When I´ll return-" T´elm became silent for a while to keep on talking with the stealth of his mind.
"-we´ll destroy the Baking Machine," T´elm tongued.
T´ayl agreed.

She saw his departure while looking askance at Tadeus, who was salivating satisfied on his sheets. Or rather she saw the sailplane departing. She would have seen the thousands of miles wide huge sails from everywhere in the lighted hemisphere. She would wait for him.

It is said that T´elm arrived in Rarante together with the new frozen inhabitants, and solved the problem of the first settlers, who insisted on his remaining. No one can know what happened actually there, if anything. The only sure thing is that T´elm returned.

Meanwhile, a hundred and eighty-three years had gone by, and Franzel, Mary, Artis, Numen, Leona, Psiches, Al, Deng, Direena, and, naturally, Tadeus had grown up as True People under T´ayl´s attentive and calm supervision. She had waited for him.

The evening of his return they loved each other almost as intensely as if they were free to do it.

The Baking Machine was far from the city. They didn´t know how much, only in which direction to move. They had managed to be dismissed from their respective jobs. T´ayl had been inventing false entries for a year about Liszt, her last boy, and the opiates T´elm took care of were growing now thin and scraggly under his watchful carefulness. Liszt´s father was a man influential and concerned enough about their crops to make both of them work into the basements of the Baking Machine.
"If they are to supervise something, let them do it to the machines that produce them, isn´t that so, Liszt?" his father said, fondling his son´s tummy.
Liszt said nothing.
It took them five days to reach there. And they found out the Baking Machine had little to do with an oven.

T´elm watched the underground machines, sunken in the stink of the electric sparks and the infinite coldness, while other Underpeople rushed about him, oiling the metal, taking away the frost and warning it up with grease-guns. The cold of the immense tanks located above their heads went through everything despite the insulating material of the floor and the uniforms, and guaranteed the frantic bustle of the workers. Save his. He only could stroll along the mile of corridor assigned to him, calibrating in detail the condition of metal and workmates. He was a good supervisor during the six years which spent there without seeing T´ayl. She looked after the upper wing and stood overnight in huts shut off from the rest. Moving freely all around the complex wasn´t allowed but to the True People, and from among these, only a few -the Evolvers. Of course T´elm was able to tongue. Thus he got to know T´ayl was watching the animals applicant to change. Still, he´d rather not to do it very often -then the cold seemed able to freeze the deepest of his mind.
He was shocked when the first accident during his staying happened -D´edgar, one of his workmates was adjusting a safety valve, when it cracked and the permafrost -as they called it in the gallery- of the tanks pounced on him and its effects were no slow in coming -it froze for ever most of his arm and a half of his trunk. T´elm and the others looked at each other in a scared stiff shattered way. D´edgar wouldn´t be good for this job or something else anymore, almost for sure.
Meantime one catlike Underperson had rushed toward the stopcocks, stopping the fluid production in time. The air begun to freeze, and so the worker´s noses. T´elm would never be able to react as quickly, or wanted to do it either.
Two True People appeared at once mummified into insulation suits wrapped up in a thin layer of heat. The robots weren´t handy in the gallery -the cold stiffened them implacably.
"Grasp it by its legs," the burlier one said, as he seized D´edgar by his armpits, one of them frozen.
D´edgar did not move, or talked. Perhaps the permafrost had killed his tongue. He just watched his mates, while being taken away. And it was not learnt nevermore about D´edgar. Neither T´ayl saw him in her wing. Who knows his fate?

T´ayl watched the men-to-be-Beasts. Or nearly men. The Womb -that was the way Underpeople, and also Men called the wing- wasn´t as cold as the underground passages where T´elm worked, even though it was directly above. Forty metres of insulating material intervened between both their thoughts.
T´ayl, together with T´esla, T´rentino, T´estudo and others took care of the animals immersed in its cages, which were awaiting nonchalantly either the handling of its genes or an anonymous death. Together the four watched constantly analyzing the subtlest changes in behaviour and shape which betrayed hopelessley those sick or inadequate to become "People", with the perfection of their implacable stillness, year after year. They found their task amusing, and it was important. The Evolvers would follow T´ayl´s verdict rather than all Beasts trainer´s, and even before that their own´s. And that was which doomed them.
His turtlemates helped her. The old T´rentino went into hibernation. Everybody considered it dead. Everybody except for who really knew him. He left inside his carapace among the organic waste of the Baking Machine, in the morning.
Luckily, he was able to wait an hour to breathe. He moved away from there with his old footfalls at night, to become a thousand years later the protagonist of his own legend.
T´esla, T´estudo and T´ayl asked for someone that replaced him. Too much animals. The Evolvers understood their attitude.
They would have as a companion somebody whom the knew but didn´t knew.
The wild Taddy -T´ayl had nicknamed him like this in memory of a son whom she watched once some time ago -swift, temperamental, uncontrollable. He rushed at its trainers when they fetched the fish for him and it was very clear that he disliked dead food. Even so, they had made him stay in his post among the applicants after his arrival four years ago, getting rid of others better than him.
He held some trumps in his favour.
They liked him.
He was a turtle.
T´ayl had tongued to him her purposes often and in answer she had got a heap of marshy orgiastic thoughts in which the fish alive and kicking played an important part. She didn´t know whether he understood her. Although she thought so -at the end of his first year he received meekly his anchovies from a surprised trainer- He would understand her.
Justice is a fruit which requires enormous care -to pick the seed, prepare the soil, watch it, pamper it, and wait. Wait for ever. When Taddy became T´adeus they knew the waiting was not eternal. It was harvest time.

T´elm slackened a screw and fixed a pressure-gauge. And watched. With suicidal taciturnity, without neglecting the rest of the plant. Week after week, one month and another. The pressure in a little minor permafrost container started to increase in an imperceptible way for any Underperson or safety cam. Only T´elm was able to notice it. And T´elm wanted a son. Three months before it occurred, he foresaw the blast of the Baking Machine with a margin for error of tenths of second.
The day they had been waiting for, T´elm tongued the last instructions to T´ayl, while the cold was strivening to freeze his brain. The trainers had to be drugged and put aside quietly. The Evolvers had to die. The cages had to be opened. All that seven minutes before T´estudo´s second turn would allow them to flee. Six minutes before they would be destroyed. T´ayl tongued the plan to T´adeus.
"Will you be able to do it?"
"Sure, little turtle. What do you think?"
"What are you going to do with the Trainers?" she went on saying, something upset. T´adeus knew nothing about the bond which tied her to T´elm. She had said nothing to the former. Or if he knew, he didn´t care.
"C´eld drives the cooks mad. Today´s lunch will ooze drug," he answered arrogantly.
"And what about the Evolvers?"
"I will deal with it."
Then his thoughts became as muddy as the water of the bog in which his one-time being trapped ducks. The being that remembered T´ayl.

C´eld was an inviting curves catlike Underperson, and he could hypnotize with the smoothness and toughness of her shy pupils.

The afternoon found them while escaping with their slow running, moving away from the doomed to die Baking Machine. The rest of Underpeople, save T´esla and T´estudo, had already overtaken them a long time ago, heading for safety. T´elm might have asked them for help to flee faster and they would have given it to him willingly.
But he didn´t do it. He was not an invalid. He was himself. And he had calculated the right time they needed to save themselves. If they did not stop. This part of the story arrived, the young homunculi nibble at their lips, and the mothers who know the tale already, begin again to cry together with their children.
"And what about T´adeus? Where is he?" T´ayl worried loud, without stopping running.
"Surely he must be far now. He´s much faster than ourselves," T´esla tried to calm her.
"We haven´t seen him coming. He hasn´t overtaken us. He must have had problems with the Evolvers."
"He must have fled in another direction," said T´elm, eager to end the talk. The easiest way were the one they had taken. All of them knew it.
"Up the hill?" T´ayl cried, increasingly nervous. "I have to tongue with him. To find out if he´s alive."
"No!" T´elm knew T´ayl. Now he understood what was going to happen. And he had to stop it.
"We must know it. We hadn´t succeeded without him," T´ayl concluded. T´elm without stopping in his running, sensed that she hesitated in hers, to pause eventually and turn back looking at the distant Baking Machine. She couldn´t tongue well at full speed. T´elm cried in silence while he ran flanked by T´esla and T´estudo.
"T´adeus! What´s going on? Are the Evolvers dead? Are you all right?"
The story doesn´t tell what became of T´adeus, and maybe it doesn´t matter to know it. With what it tells about T´ayl is enough.
T´ayl kept on tonguing -T´elm hoped that on seeing them to go on fleeing, she would be after them right away. It was his last hope. It was not fulfilled.- She kept on tonguing the same when T´elm and the others surpassed her and when the Baking Machine blasted. And the permafrost flew starving towards her, freezing the air when passing for ever.

T´esla and T´estudo were good mates. They stood near the solid permafrost for a lustrum, mourning T´ayl´s misfortune. Then they departed. They promised to come back.
T´elm stood on together with T´ayl. He could see her vaguely through the translucent ice mound which stretched out up to the demolished debris of the Baking Machine, and further on, up the hill.
He would wait for her. Till the end of time, she had said.
He could do it.
He did it.