Well, Honoria Fu wasn’t just any gal, but none of these signed up for New Paradise in the first place.
She was our first Senior Agriculturalist, with a triple vote share on top of her standard stake, and the final word on experiment plot allocation. If you wanted to try that new millet variety this season and not the next you’d be smart to know which way she’ll vote and let her know you’re voting the same.
No surprise then, that Honoria’s own plot was on what passed for the best soil back then, nor that seedlings grew best. Her house was grown from her own trademarked willban seed and got to four rooms high by the end of the first year, all lit with giant phospho-fluff balls. She braided the air roots into a hammock nest. Said she never slept so good on Earth as she did with New Paradise wind rocking her, but I think she was just showing off.
No surprise either that she wasn’t quite as hollow-cheeked as the rest of us, had some nice rounded muscle with her sinew and some nice color when she broke the dust helmet off. She’s the one who came up with it, you know. Said dust would be there anyhow, so might as well add a bit of sap and make it into a proper sun screen. Most of us had hair before that, and wasn’t it half a pain.
Yes, some gal was Honoria Fu, and if not every available man suited up to her I’d say it was at least nine in ten. She was old-fashioned, though, said she wouldn’t start a kid nor a family with a man that couldn’t match her marriage portion. You’d think a no-stake beefcake like Avi would know better than to even ask.
They took the fait hard, those security guys. All that muscle demanded food we didn’t have, and the tensions were so high in the early days they were constantly defusing someone, Avi especially. He was the one people called for screamers at night, and for catatonics after noonstorms, because he was good at talking people into living, and because he went. No plot of his own, no baggage allowance, just the one vote share and a harmonica, but he worked as hard as anyone and harder than most.
By the time Avi took off after the first harvest there wasn’t much of him to see except eyes, shoulders, and nose – man looked like an arrow from every angle. Honoria never mentioned what he said to her at the time, except to let us know he was off surveying. What she told the kids later I wouldn’t know, but he only came back the once. Put his share of work into spring planting, burned that heart-shaped ditch around Honoria’s plot with a blastatrencher, and was off again. Sure we knew where he went – he never stopped blasting that basalt, but none of us had the time spare to follow, and a blastatrencher wasn’t what you’d call primary-need equipment by then.
We never did see Avi again. First we knew anything was when his pack floated in on the stream and tangled up below Honoria’s sleeping hammock. We’re all lucky willban shoots made a natural dam, else there’d be no harvest that year. For a month or so every time one looked up from the ground that tree got taller, not that we had much time to look up, what with digging the irrigation trenches, and setting up the evaporation covers, and blasting cisterns. You can see it all the way from here, the family rents the bottom hall for community meetings and baby-starting parties.
The surveyors came back from the plateau and said Avi tried for a quanat and miscalculated the pressure. Poor guy, he got his spot on people skills, not math. That did cut into the joy a bit, but not enough to matter, for most of us. We put up a nice obelisk at the caldera, of course, and named it after him, for all the good it did.
Once we calculated the volume and replenishment rate Honoria announced that her marriage portion was met and over-met, and started the first kid. Got one in every three years like clockwork until she was well into her seventies, all with the same start date. Never did marry or do any other guy’s kids. After the fifth one we didn’t even bother listing them individually on party banners. Eventually, with the grandkids and all, there got to be so many it was easier to just make Avi Brood Day an off-work holiday.