The Honey Hour
Halle was halfway along the corridor with the grey wool square in both hands when the hum changed. It had been a low note all evening, the kind you feel in your teeth. Now it slid lower, and the lights went from white to honey. She pressed her palm flat to the wall strip, which was rough as a cat's tongue, and stopped drifting. Fern rode in the crook of her arm, spines tipped mossy green, nose working. "There it is," Halle said. The station was not worried. The station was only getting ready, the way a house gets ready when someone opens a window and the curtains begin to lean. Something was coming across the sun.
Fern rolled into a ball the size of a bread roll and hung there, quills out, feet hidden. Halle held her without squeezing. The spines were not sharp so much as firm, like the bristles of an old brush, and the little green tips brushed her thumb. "It's only weather," she said. "Wind off the sun. It comes past us and it goes on." Through the round window Earth turned below, blue and slow, with a white smear of real weather curled over an ocean. Up here the weather had no rain in it. Up here the weather came as light, and the station made ready by going quiet and letting it through.
During the honey hour the ring stopped turning, and everything with a weight remembered it had none. Halle knew the list by heart. Loose things went into nets. Open water went under lids. Anything with roots got tied down gently, because plants do not like surprises. She pushed off from the rail and floated toward the garden room with Fern still round in her arm. "Make room, Fern," she said. "Something big is passing." The corridor wall went by under her hand in long ribbed stripes, warm, then cool where a pipe ran behind it. Her hair began to lift at the ends, which meant the ring was already slowing.
The garden room smelled of wet clay and cut stems. Nine pots sat along the window sill, and every one of them would have gone wandering. Halle lifted the first, a fat pot of mint with grit crusted on the rim, and slid it into the wall net. The net was knotted string, gone soft from years of hands. She tucked the second pot beside it, and the third, working along the sill while Fern uncurled one eye's worth and watched. The leaves had already begun to rise. Mint smells stronger when it floats, she thought. The whole room was lifting its chin, the way a dog does when it hears a car.
Two of the pots clinked when she pushed them together, a small sharp sound she did not like. So Halle folded the wool square in half and wedged it between them. The wool was thick and a little greasy, felted so tight you could not find one thread in it, and it took the clink out of the room. Fern unrolled the rest of the way. She put her front feet on Halle's wrist, which felt like four cool pebbles, and sniffed toward the mint. "You can help," Halle said. "Find me the rolling ones." Fern went along the bench with her nose down and nudged a seed tray into Halle's waiting hand.
The water tray was the hard part. It lay under the seedlings, a finger deep, and it had already begun to dome up in the middle like the back of a spoon. Halle slid the lid across slowly, so as not to push the water out. At the last corner a bead escaped and hung there, a wobbling glass marble with the whole room bent small inside it. Fern stared at it. Halle caught it on the wool, where it sank in and went from a marble to a dark patch. "Make room, Fern," she said. "Something big is passing." The lights dropped another shade, from honey to amber, and the hum went almost away.
Then the ring stopped, and the floor let go of them both. Halle felt it in her stomach first, a lift like the top of a swing. Fern spread all four feet and turned over twice, slowly, spines fanned, looking astonished. Halle laughed and caught her. Around them the room had risen: a trowel turning end over end, three grains of grit, one mint leaf sailing like a small green boat. Nothing was falling. Nothing was breaking. The room had only been asked to hold everything a little differently for a while, and the room had said yes. She put the trowel in the net and let the leaf go where it liked.
They pushed off together for the round window, Fern holding Halle's sleeve with her front feet. The glass was cold, and frost had crept along the outside edge in feathers she could feel through the pane as fine ridges. Below, Earth's night side had come around. Halle put her forehead to it. "It should be soon now," she said. For a while there was only the dark curve, the little gold spills of cities, and white clouds lit from underneath by storms that had nothing to do with them. Fern's nose left small circles of fog on the glass. Halle rubbed one away with her thumb, and the squeak went all the way up her arm.
It came the way a curtain comes when someone walks past it in another room. First a green line along the top of the dark. Then the line widened and began to move, hanging in folds, combing itself out sideways over the whole northern edge of the world. It looked, Halle thought, exactly like the wool square looked when you pulled it apart in the light: soft and fibrous, layer behind layer, green shading up into pink at the ends. Fern stopped breathing for a second. Then she pressed her whole front against the glass, nose flat, spines up, entirely unshy. Halle said nothing at all, in case saying something used it up.
They stayed a long time. The station held its lights low and turned one shoulder to the sun, and the green went on unfolding beneath them, patient, never twice the same. Now and then a ribbon brightened until Halle could see the shine of it on Fern's spine tips. The mint floated. The trowel floated. Somewhere a pump ticked over and went back to sleep. Halle did not say anything more. Everything in the room had already been given its place, and there was nothing left to do but hold on to the rail and watch. The frost feathers at the edge of the glass had grown a little wider.
When her eyes began to sting, Halle went and fetched the wool square from between the pots. She hooked two corners on the net and two on the rail, and it hung there in the middle of the air, not a hammock and not a blanket, just a warm grey place to be. She slid in sideways. Fern came after and settled against her ribs, and the spines went down the way grass goes down when you sit on it. The damp patch from the water bead had almost dried. Through the window the green was thinner now, more pink than green, sliding east along the rim of the world.
Little by little the ring began to turn again. Halle felt the pull come back, so slight at first that it was only the sense of a floor somewhere below. The mint leaf came down and landed on the bench. The grains of grit came down. The water under the lid lay flat again and stopped pretending to be a dome. The lights came up one shade, from amber to honey, and the hum returned to its old low note, the one you feel in your teeth. The wool sagged gently beneath her. Halle counted the pots in their net, nine of them, all where she had put them. Fern was already breathing the slow way.
Halle reached down and found one of Fern's front feet, four cool pebbles, and closed her fingers around it. Fern held on without waking. Outside, the last of the green thinned to almost nothing, a pale smudge along the top of the dark, and then the sunrise line came up over the ocean the way it did sixteen times a day here, unhurried, as if it had all the time there was. "Make room, Fern," Halle said, almost asleep. "Something big is passing." But it had passed already. The wool smelled faintly of mint, and her hand stayed exactly where it was until morning.
