Kalus, feeling a genuine desire to work and do his share, as
well as needing something to distract him, began to work the fields with
Jim Smith, the botanist, his only real friend among the colonists. He
still spoke to Kataya, but had told her that for a time it was best they
keep some distance between them, and she had not objected. She
understood, and kept a warm secret of the fact that her menstrual cycle
was now a week overdue.
Under other circumstances, Kalus might have fallen in love with the
rigors and lessons of farming, which taught patience and perseverance,
and returned the most beautiful and honest of rewards: Life itself.
When Smith told him that by the year 2000 the smaller, family farms of
America were largely a thing of the past, he thought it a greater
tragedy than almost any he had heard of. And unknowingly, as Smith
continued to tell him of his own childhood on the Indiana farm, of his
family's hardships and eventual ruin, Kalus weaved the themes of the
story in and out of his own.
Because as he toiled, he too felt the creeping sense of fatalism that
told him all was lost, and the meaning gone out of his life. He too
felt events pushing toward some dark and bitter climax over which he
seemed to have little control. All this though he raged, and cursed,
and worked harder still.
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