On ascension day, Bridget was the last to struggle through the bent and scarred opening into the world. Her eyes could not resolve the blur of gray and brown at first, and when she looked up she nearly fell, her eyes watering; the sky was not blue with a golden sun but flat and gray and so vast she felt it must crush her. She sat down and then lay flat, pressing into the floor--the ground, she must remember to call it, the Irish soil--which was soft and made of grains of earth and woven strands of growing things. She heard the shouts of the others, some afraid to move away from the hatch, some running wildly about with Mr. Fitzhugh ordering them to stop; but they all sounded as if muffled through the wall hangings that decorated the nuclear-war survival capsule she and the other members of the textiles group had just emerged from, and she began to understand what distance was.
"Oh, God," her mother was crying, softly, repeatedly. She had fallen to her knees and drawn handfuls of the green growth to her damp, red face. Bridget moved closer to peer at the short-stemmed, delicate plants. "Mam?"
"The clover, Bridget. It should only have three leaves, but four was considered lucky, and Bridget, even after the blast and a century's time, it's still here...."
Bridget grew uncomfortable with the unexpected emotion and turned her eyes to a row of black stumps surrounded by tufts of baby trees, recognizable though none exactly fit the videos she had seen. The air was thick with odors, sweet and acrid, and she opened her mouth to breathe as if she could unravel its components with her tongue.
After her seven years in the caps below, the last seven wakes were clearest in her mind. She clutched the leperchaun embroidery in her pocket--leprechaun, Mrs. Simmons the schoolteacher had corrected her, telling her gently that they were not real--and remembered the day in class when they had discussed the coming ascension in real terms for the first time, because the communication cap had announced that it was really going to happen. In preparation she had rehearsed to herself the forbidden words for rain and sun and sky--báisteach, grian, spéir--and counted in her mind the colors in the tiny rainbow thrown on the wall by her brother David's bit of angled glass, so that she would recognize the big ones when she saw them.
"My father says we don't know if it isn't all water above and no floor at all anymore, that the heat melted the ice at the top of the world and flooded our islands," David had said.
"My father said that was a bomb the IRA could understand," Jimmy Hanlon had put in, not to be bested in father-quoting.
The words had blurred into meaningless babble to Bridget, although she was trained to memorize instead of using limited paper and disks; when Mrs. Simmons wasn't looking, she had slipped out a book of fairy stories and let the stuffy workroom fade away.
The next thing she had known, David was yanking the book from her hands. "Lesson's over and Jesus will you come out of that dreamworld of yours."
"Leave her," Glenn Fitzhugh had said softly. "She's just a wee wane, and you're a bully, Dai."
Bridget had followed the altercation absently, her eyes still on the yellow page. She appreciated Glenn's kindness and had been sorry when David hit him, because Glenn couldn't fight back without hurting. David had cursed her, which stung because it meant that Father did it. He had said she was unwanted, she was the third child, Mother broke the rules, Mother was a Catholic and they were bad and stupid but nobody wanted any more trouble so they pretended that Great-great-grandfather hadn't smuggled Great-great-grandmother down here, taking the Compact in bad faith, and Father pretended he wasn't sorry because everyone had to marry according to genetics and lots of times it didn't work out and no one else complained, and he worked extra hard as if it could make up for the extra mouth to feed, and the one good thing about ascension was being rid of Them....
"You're half one if what you say is true," Glenn had said with bovine, implacable logic from the pile of cloth into which David had pushed him. David had had a tantrum then and Mrs. Simmons had come in and scolded them for not being at tea and Bridget had squeezed her leprechaun tightly and looked up from the sewing benches and fiber recyclers to the smooth gray walls and lighting tubes above, above, where there wouldn't be any fighting anymore.
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