“That was ever her way. I was the elder; I would bid her show respect for her father and mother, for our line, for tradition. I bid her do as I did, for I showed respect always. But what I showed always was not… She told me that I feared more than I honored. She never feared. Our father hated her skill at devising and constructing, and forbade her to use it. She would flout him, and he would play the tyrant, and she would defy him even to laughter.” He dashed the tears away with one hand and lifted his chin. “I thought I would find that, in her heart, her home and mine had been ever the same. I thought, when she left, that she had left only him, and not the land, not the past, not—” He brought himself up short. “But if that was so, you see, she would have decanted the liquor.”

He set it back in the cupboard, like someone setting a memory away.

For a moment, we stayed like that, hanging between old beliefs and new ones. I said, “The funeral’s tomorrow. Would you like to come?”

His brows drew together. Then his face cleared and became almost serene. “Yes, that would please me, if it can be done.”

We finished the contents of the teapot, and eventually switched to beer. There wasn’t any trouble finding something to talk about: we talked about her. He told me about her as a child, about the tree fort that she’d designed and bullied her brother and his friends into assembling, with an elevator made of a wooden platform, a rope, and two pulleys, complete with a friction brake which, he assured me, laughing, worked most of the time. She’d gotten hold of some eyeglass lenses from out in the World and tried to build a telescope.

Children and even much older kids brought her broken things to fix, and she’d do it in secret, in trade for whatever bits of mechanical or electrical things they could find for her. The electrical things were almost impossible to get, but they were her favorites. One night, when the whole house was asleep, she’d crept to her brother’s room and woken him, and insisted he come to hers. Then she made him climb into the wardrobe with her, to show him what she’d hidden there in the dark: an electric clock working off an improvised battery, its lighted face glowing greenish-silver like the moon behind a cloud, its second hand making its steady way around the dial, its motor running with a faint, buzzing whisper.