The Silence of Caraz

Sofia Meyers was forty-two years old and she had taken three buses to get to Caraz, and the last one had a rooster in it, and she was not going to complain about any of that because the mountains at the end of the road made all of it worth the trouble. She stepped off at the plaza, adjusted the strap of her duffel, and asked a woman selling picarones where she could find Rufus Fisher's workshop.

The woman pointed up a side street and said, "The adobe place with the wood smell, you can't miss it!"

She could smell it before she saw it, actually. Wood shavings and something herbal underneath it, and eucalyptus from the trees lining the road. The valley was quiet in a way Sofia had never experienced anywhere else. No phone signal, no engines droning on some highway, nothing. Just the clack clack clack of a ceramic pestle against a mortar somewhere behind the workshop, steady as a heartbeat.

"Hello?" she called at the open door. "Anybody home?"

A man's head popped up from behind a workbench. He was fifty-six or thereabouts, white hair tied back, forearms like someone who had spent decades bending wood instead of going to a gym. "Sofia Meyers!" he shouted, like she was a long-lost cousin instead of a buyer he'd exchanged maybe ten emails with. "You actually came! I told my neighbor you'd back out. He owes me ten soles now."

"I hope you split it with me," Sofia said, laughing, and stuck out her hand.

Rufus shook it with both of his. His palms were rough as a cat's tongue. "Come in, come in, careful with the low beam, everybody cracks their head once. It's a tradition. You want coffee? It's the instant kind, I'll be honest with you."

"I've had worse on a transport plane. Instant is a luxury."

He poured her a chipped mug and led her through the workshop. Low adobe ceiling, wooden spoke shaves lined up along the walls on little pegs like a museum nobody visited. She counted at least thirty of them. Some were dark with old oil, some pale and raw. The bankruptcy paperwork sat in a folder on the bench, and Rufus tapped it with one finger like it was a dead relative he didn't want to talk about.

"So this is it," he said. "Forty-one years of tools. I told you on the phone, the bank gets the building, but I got to choose who the collection goes to. I read your article in that woodworking journal, the one about heritage tools, and I said, this woman gets it. She'll keep them working, not hang them on a wall."

"That's the plan," Sofia said. "Every one of them gets used. I run a teaching bench back in Ohio, and the students go through my old shaves like sandpaper. They need these."

"Good. Good." He clapped his hands, and then a look crossed his face, something she couldn't read. "There's one condition, and it's a small one. You take the pestle too."

"The what?"

He nodded at the corner of the room. There was a squat ceramic mortar on a stool, and leaning against it a pestle stained a deep purplish red from top to bottom. Beetroot, by the look of it, soaked into the glaze like a birthmark. It looked completely out of place among all the clean wood tools.

"I grind my herbs in it," Rufus said. "Evening teas, for the night watches. When the station folks come by, I make them a brew. Beetroot stains everything, it's useless in the kitchen now, but I'd hate to see it thrown out."

"I can take a pestle," Sofia said, hiding a smile. It was such a strange rider for a document of sale. "Anything else in the deal I should know about? A haunted anvil? A cursed mule?"

He laughed, but it came out a little thin. "Just the pestle. And maybe a warning. You're staying the night, aren't you? At the hostel by the plaza?"

"I am. Why?"

"Keep your radio off. Anything with a speaker, off, after dark. This whole valley is a radio quiet zone, that's why the astronomy station is up the hill, and the rules are strict. But I'm serious beyond the rules. On some nights, the quiet here gets thick. When it gets too thick, don't go chasing sounds. Come inside, bolt the door, drink the tea I'll give you."

Sofia looked at him. He was grinning, but not with his eyes. "That's a weird sales pitch, Rufus."

"It's a weird valley," he said, and poured himself coffee too.

That was when she saw him.

Across the workshop, half hidden behind a rack of wheel hubs, a man stood with a compass case open on the bench in front of him. Tall, graying at the temples, glasses pushed up on his forehead. He was bent over a brass marine compass with a tiny screwdriver, and his tongue was stuck out the corner of his mouth in concentration, and Sofia felt her stomach do something it had not done in seven years.

Roy Fredericks.

He looked up at that exact moment, the way people do when they're being talked about, and froze. The screwdriver stayed in his hand. "Sofia?"

"Hey, Roy."

"Hey. Wow. Hi." He set the screwdriver down very carefully, like his fingers weren't steady enough to just drop it. "You look, uh. You look great. You look the same. Both things."

"You look the same too," she said, and it was true. Forty-four years old and still that narrow face, still that way of standing like he was bracing for a door to hit him. Her heart was doing something stupid and she told it to knock it off. "What are you doing here? Last I heard you were in Arecibo."

"Was. Then the telescope there came down, and the station up the hill hired me. I adjust their compasses and calibrate the instruments. Four years now." He shrugged. "I've been coming down to Rufus's shop every couple weeks for years. He keeps the only coffee in the valley worth drinking."

"The instant kind?" Sofia said, and Roy laughed, and the sound of it hit her somewhere behind the ribs.

"The worst coffee in Peru," Roy agreed. "I drink it anyway."

Rufus looked back and forth between them as a man watching a tennis match. "You two know each other? In my shop? On my handover day?"

"We dated," Roy said. "A while back. Seven years ago, during her leave."

"Seven years," Sofia confirmed. "Three wonderful weeks and one extremely awkward airport goodbye."

"Best airport goodbye of my life, I should note."

Rufus whistled. "Small valley. Smaller world. Sit down, both of you, I have more chairs than customers."

They sat. Sofia on a crate of wood screws, Roy on a stool that wobbled, and for a while the three of them drank bad coffee and talked about nothing, the buses, the picarones vendor, the price of brass. Underneath the small talk, Sofia kept catching Roy's eye and looking away, and catching it again. There was a question hanging in the air between them, old and patient. Are we still angry? Are we still anything?

Neither of them asked it out loud. Not yet.

The pestle clacking sound had stopped, she noticed. Somewhere behind the workshop it had been going the whole time, steady, and now the afternoon had a hole in it where that sound used to be.

"Your neighbor stopped grinding," she said to Rufus.

Rufus's head came up sharply. "Ernesto? He grinds till sundown, every day, never stops early." He got up and went to the back door and looked out for a long time. When he came back his face was carefully neutral. "Probably ran out of corn. I'll check on him later. Anyway. The paperwork."

They signed the handover at the workbench. Rufus signed with a fountain pen that leaked, Sofia signed twice because her first signature looked like a seismograph reading, and Roy witnessed it without being asked, which somehow made it feel more official. Then Rufus wrapped four of the spoke shaves in newspaper for her to carry to the hostel, and set the beet-stained pestle in her duffel with a strange ceremony, like he was handing over a sword.

"You'll want the tea tonight," he said. "I'll bring it by the hostel before dark. Mint, muña, a few things I dry myself. Drink it hot."

"Rufus, it's tea, not a sacrament," Sofia said.

"Everything's a sacrament in this valley," he said, and this time he didn't smile at all.

Outside, the light was going gold and long, and the eucalyptus smelled sharp and clean. Roy walked her as far as the corner, compass case under his arm, and they stood there a moment in that awful, wonderful awkwardness.

"Are you free later?" he asked. "I mean, not for anything, just. There's a viewing pad up by the station. No light pollution. The stars are unreal, Sofia. I'd like to show you. If you want."

"I'd like that," she said, maybe too fast, and didn't care. "What time?"

"Nine? After my shift checks wrap up. Wear a jacket, it gets cold."

"It gets cold," she repeated, like an idiot, and he smiled at her, and walked off up the hill with his crooked compass case, and she stood on the corner of a dirt street in a silent valley holding a duffel full of wood tools and one beet-stained pestle, grinning like she'd won something.

Behind her, from deep in the workshop, she heard Rufus say quietly, to nobody, "He stopped early. He never stops early."

* * *

The hostel by the plaza had a courtyard with two plastic chairs and a clothesline, and Sofia sat in one of the chairs with her jacket over her knees, waiting for nine o'clock like it was a bus departure. The duffel sat at her feet. She kept looking at the pestle sticking out of it, purplish red and dumb and heavy, and wondering what kind of man gives a woman a grinding stick as a goodbye gift.

At ten past nine she was on the road up the hill with the duffel over her shoulder, because she had decided the pestle was not leaving her sight, which was ridiculous, and because ten past nine was when Roy finally texted that his shift checks had wrapped. The walk took twenty minutes. The valley got darker with every step, which sounds like a complaint but wasn't. She'd spent the last deployment in a place where the night sky was sodium lamps and helicopter lights, and here the stars came out so thick and so fast that she actually laughed out loud on the empty road, alone, like someone who talks to herself on buses. Which she also does.

Roy was waiting at the pad. It was a flat concrete slab with a low rail around it, and the station's dishes stood off to the side, huge and pale and turned slightly away, like a row of people politely not eavesdropping. No lights anywhere. His face was a gray suggestion above a flashlight he wasn't using.

"You walked up in the dark," he said.

"I walked up in the dark," she agreed. "Look at me, a daredevil."

"You always were. You ate that fish in Lima whole, bones and all, to prove a point I still don't understand."

"The point was that I could." She came and stood next to him at the rail. "Seven years. You look good, Roy."

"You look good too. Soldier good. Which I suppose tracks."

"It tracks." She tipped her head back. The Milky Way wasn't a smudge here, it was a structure, a spill of light with actual depth to it. "Okay, you were right. That's worth the twenty-minute hike. That's worth three buses and a rooster."

"Tell me about the rooster."

"There was a rooster on the last bus. A live one. It rode in a box on the seat across from me and judged me the entire way."

"Judged you how?"

"Loudly. Roy, why did we not keep in touch? Genuinely. I've thought about it and I can't come up with a reason, only an excuse, which was distance."

He was quiet a moment. Out in the dark, one of the dish motors made a soft whir and stopped. "Because I was a coward, mostly. You were going back to a whole life and I was going to stay here and adjust compasses, and I figured silence was easier than watching it fade."

"Silence is easier," she said. "Until it isn't."

"Until it isn't," he agreed.

And that was when they heard it. Not silence. The opposite of silence, somehow, a hum so low it wasn't a sound so much as a pressure, a note felt in the teeth. Sofia felt it in her fillings. The dishes up on their mounts shivered, a fine fast tremble she could see even without the flashlight.

"Roy. What is that?"

"Nothing." He said it too fast. "That's nothing, the array does that sometimes when the, when there's interference."

"The dishes are shaking."

"They don't shake." He had his glasses down off his forehead now, actually on his face, which she remembered meant he was rattled. "They don't shake," he said again, quieter.

The hum swelled and died, swelled and died, like something enormous breathing through the ground. Then it stopped, and the stop was worse. The whole valley went so quiet her ears rang.

"Okay," Sofia said. "I don't like that. I've been shot at, Roy, and I like that less than I should, and I would like to know what it is."

"Rufus knows more than he says. Come on, let's go down, let's go ask him what he's not saying."

* * *

Rufus was on his front step with a mug of tea when they got there, which was strange in itself, because his house was two doors from the workshop and it was nearly eleven and the man was sitting outside in the cold like he'd been waiting. Maybe he had. There was a second mug on the step