People No Different Flesh

The People

No Different Flesh

The Second Book of

the People

Zenna Henderson

1967

NO DIFFERENT FLESH

Meris watched the darkness rip open and mend itself again in the same blinding flash that closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids the dark reversals flicked and faded. Thunder jarred the cabin window where she leaned and troubled her bones. The storm had been gathering all afternoon, billowing up in blue and white thunderheads over the hills, spreading darkly, somberly to snuff the sunset. The wind was not the straight-blowing, tree-lashing, branch-breaker of the usual summer storm. Instead, it blew simultaneously from several directions. It mourned like a snow wind around the eaves of the cabin. It ripped the length of the canyon through the treetops while the brush below hardly stirred a twig. Lightning was so continuous now that glimpses of the outdoors came through the windows like vast shouts and sudden blows.

Lights in the cabin gasped, recovered, and died. Meris heard Mark’s sigh and the ruffle of his pushed-back papers.

“I’ll get the lantern,” he said. “It’s out in the storeroom, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Lightning flushed the whole room, now that the light no longer defended it. “But it needs filling. Why don’t we wait to see if the lights come back on. We could watch the storm-“

“I’m sorry.” Mark’s arm was gentle across her shoulders. “I’d like to, but I can’t spare the time. Every minute-“

Meris pressed her face to the glass, peering out into the chaotic darkness of the canyon wall. She still wasn’t quite used to being interested in anything outside her own grief and misery-all those long months of painful numbness that at the same time had been a protesting hammering at the Golden Gates and a wild shrieking at God. What a blessed relief it was finally to be able to let go of the baby-to feel grief begin to drain away as though a boil had been lanced. Not that sorrow would be gone, but now there could be healing for the blow that had been too heavy to be mortal.

“Take good care of her,” she whispered to the bright slash of the lightning. “Keep her safe and happy until I come.”

She winced away from the window, startled at the sudden audible splat of rain against the glass. The splat became a rattle and the rattle a gushing roar and the fade-and-flare of the outdoors dissolved into streaming rain.

Mark came back into the cabin, the fight in his hands flooding blue-white across the room. He hung the lantern on the beam above the table and joined Meris at the window.

“The storm is about over,” said Meris, turning in the curve of his arm. “It’s only rain now.”

“It’ll be back,” he said. “It’s just taking a deep breath before smacking us amidships again.”

“Mark.” The tone of Meris’s voice caught his attention.

“Mark, my baby-our baby-is dead.” She held out the statement to him as if offering a gift-her first controlled reference to what had happened.

“Yes,” said Mark, “our baby is dead.” He accepted the gift.

“We waited for her so long,” said Meris softly, “and had her for so short a time.”

“But long enough that you are a mother and I am a father,” said Mark. “We still have that.”

“Now that I can finally talk about her,” said Meris, “I won’t have to talk about her any more. I can let her be gone now. Oh, Mark!” Meris held his hand to her cheek. “Having you to anchor me is all that’s kept me from-“

“I’m set in my ways,” smiled Mark. “But of late you’ve been lifting such a weight off me that I don’t think I could anchor a butterfly now!”

“Love you, Mark!”

“Love you, Meris!” Mark hugged her tightly a moment and then let her go. “Back to work again. No flexibility left in the deadline any more. It has to be done on time this time or-“

Lightning splashed brightness against the wall. Meris moved back to the window again, the floorboards under her feet vibrating to the thunder. “Here it comes again!” But Mark was busy, his scurrying fingers trying to catch up with the hours and days and months lost to Meris’s grief and wild mourning.

Meris cupped her hands around her temples and leaned her forehead to the windowpane. The storm was truly back again, whipping the brush and trees in a fury that ripped off leaves and small branches. A couple of raindrops cracked with the force of hail against the glass. Lightning and a huge explosion arrived at the same moment, jarring the whole cabin.

“Hit something close?” asked Mark with no pause in the staccato of his typing.

“Close,” said Meris. “The big pine by the gate. I saw the bark fly.”

“Hope it didn’t kill it,” said Mark. “We lost those two in back like that last summer, you know.”

Meris tried to see the tree through the darkness, but the lightning had withdrawn for the moment.

“What was that?” she cried, puzzled.

“What?” asked Mark.

“I heard something fall,” she said. “Through the trees.”

“Probably the top of our pine,” said Mark. “I guess the lightning made more than bark fly. Well, there goes another of our trees,”

“That’s the one the jays liked particularly, too,” said Meris.

Rain drenched again in a vertical obscurity down the glass and the flashes of lightning flushed heavily through the watery waver.

Later the lights came on and Meris, blinking against the brightness, went to bed, drawing the curtain across the bunk corner, leaving Mark at work at his desk. She lay awake briefly, hearing the drum of the rain and the mutter of the thunder, hardly noticing the clatter of the typewriter. She touched cautiously with her thoughts the aching emptiness where the intolerable burden of her unresolved grief had been. Almost, she felt without purpose-aimless-since that painful focusing of her whole life was going. She sighed into her pillow. New purpose and new aim would come-would have to come-to fill the emptinesses.

Somewhere in the timeless darkness of the night she was suddenly awake, sitting bolt upright in bed. She pulled the bedclothes up to her chin, shivering a little in the raw, damp air of the cabin. What had wakened her? The sound came again. She gasped and Mark stirred uneasily, then was immediately wide awake and sitting up beside her.

“Meris?”

“I heard something,” she said. “Oh, Mark! Honestly, I heard something.”

“What was it?” Mark pulled the blanket up across her back.

“I heard a baby crying,” said Meris.

She felt Mark’s resigned recoil and the patience in his long indrawn breath.

“Honest, Mark!” In the semi-obscurity her eyes pleaded with him. “I really heard a baby crying. Not a tiny baby-like-like ours. A very young child, though. Out there in the cold and wet.”

“Meris ” he began, and she knew the sorrow that must be marking his face.

“There!” she cried. “Hear it?”

The two were poised motionless for a moment, then Mark was out of bed and at the door. He flung it open to the night and they listened again, tensely.

They heard a night bird cry and, somewhere up-canyon, the brief barking of a dog, but nothing else.

Mark came back to bed, diving under the covers with a shiver.

“Come warm me, woman!” he cried, hugging Meris tightly to him.

“It did sound like a baby crying,” she said with a half question in her voice.

“It sure did,” said Mark. “I thought for a minute-Must have been some beast or bird or denizen of the wild-” His voice trailed away sleepily, his arms relaxing. Meris lay awake listening-to Mark’s breathing, to the night, to the cry that didn’t come again. Refusing to listen for the cry that would never come again, she slept.

Next morning was so green and gold and sunny and wet and fresh that Meris felt a-tiptoe before she even got out of bed. She dragged Mark, protesting, from the warm nest of the bedclothes and presented him with a huge breakfast. They laughed at each other across the table, their hands clasped over the dirty dishes. Meris felt a surge of gratitude. The return of laughter is a priceless gift.

While she did the dishes and put the cabin to rights, Mark, shrugging into his Levi jacket against the chill, went out to check the storm damage.

Meris heard a shout and the dozen echoes that returned diminishingly from the heavily wooded mountainsides. She pushed the window curtain aside and peered out as she finished drying a plate.

Mark was chasing a fluttering something, out across the creek. The boisterous waters were slapping against the bottom of the plank bridge and Mark was splashing more than ankle-deep on the flat beyond as he plunged about trying to catch whatever it was that evaded him.

“A bird,” guessed Meris. “A huge bird waterlogged by the storm. Or knocked down by the wind maybe hurt ” She hurried to put the plate away and dropped the dish towel on the table. She peered out again. Mark was half hidden behind the clumps of small willows along the bend of the creek. She heard his cry of triumph and then of astonishment. The fluttering thing shot up, out of reach above Mark, and seemed to be trying to disappear into the ceaseless shiver of the tender green and white aspens. Whatever it was, a whitish blob against the green foliage, dropped down again and Mark grabbed it firmly.

Meris ran to the door and flung it open, stepping out with a shiver into the cold air. Mark saw her as he rounded the curve in the path.

“Look what I found!” he cried. “Look what I caught for you!”

Meris put a hand on the wet, muddy bundle Mark was carrying and thought quickly, “Where are the feathers?”

“I caught a baby for you!” cried Mark. Then his smile died and he thrust the bundle at her. “Good Lord, Meris!” he choked, “I’m not fooling! It is a baby!”

Meris turned back a sodden fold and gasped. A face! A child face, mud-smudged, with huge dark eyes and tangled dark curls. A quiet, watchful face-not crying. Maybe too frightened to cry?

“Mark!” Meris clutched the bundle to her and hurried into the cabin. “Build up the fire in the stove,” she said, laying her burden on the table. She peeled the outer layer off quickly and let it fall soggily to the floor. Another damp layer and then another. “Oh, poor messy child!” she crooned. “Poor wet, messy, little girl!’”

“Where did she come from?” Mark wondered. “There must be some clue-” He changed quickly from his soaked sneakers into his hiking boots. “I’ll go check. There must be something out there.” His hands paused on the knotting of the last bootlace. “Or someone.” He stood up, settling himself into his jeans and boots. “Take it easy, Meris.” He kissed her cheek as she bent over the child and left.

Meris’s fingers recalled more and more of their deftness as she washed the small girl-body, improvised a diaper of a dish towel, converted a tee shirt into a gown, all the time being watched silently by the big dark eyes that now seemed more wary than frightened, watched as though the child was trying to read her lips that were moving so readily in the old remembered endearments and croonings. Finally, swathing the small form in her chenille robe in lieu of a blanket, she sat on the edge of the bed, rocking and crooning to the child. She held a cup of warm milk to the small mouth. There was a firming of lips against it at first and then the small mouth opened and two small hands grasped the cup and the milk was gulped down greedily. Meris wiped the milky crescent from the child’s upper lip and felt the tenseness going out of the small body as the warmth of the milk penetrated it. The huge dark eyes in the small face closed, jerked open, closed slowly and stayed closed.

Meris sat cradling the heavy warmth of the sleeping child. She felt healing flow through her own body and closed her eyes in silent thanksgiving before she put her down, well back from the edge of the bed. Then she gathered up the armful of wet muddy clothes and reached for the box of detergent.

When Mark returned some time later, Meris gestured quickly. “She’s sleeping,” she said. “Oh, Mark! Just think! A baby!” Tears came to her eyes and she bent her head.

“Meris,” Mark’s gentle voice lifted her face. “Meris, just don’t forget that the baby is not ours to keep.”

“I know-I” She began to protest and then she smoothed the hair back from her forehead, knowing what Mark wanted to save her from. “The baby is not ours-to keep,” she relinquished. “Not ours to keep. Did you find anything, or anyone,” she hesitated.

“Nothing,” said Mark. “Except the top of our pine is still there, if you’ve bothered to check it. And,” his face tightened and his voice was grim, “those vandals have been at it again. Since I was at the picnic area at Beaver Bend they’ve been there and sawed every table in two and smashed them all to the ground in the middle!”

“Oh, Mark!” Meris was distressed. “Are you sure it’s the same bunch?”

“Who else around here would do anything so senseless?” asked Mark. “It’s those kids. If I ever catch them-“

“You did once,” said Meris with a half smile, “and they didn’t like what you and the ranger said to them.”

“Understatement of the week,” said Mark. “They’ll like even less what’s going to happen to them the next time they get caught.”

“They’re mad enough at you already,” suggested Meris.

“Well,” said Mark, “I’m proud to count that type among my enemies!”

“The Winstel boy doesn’t seem the type,” said Meris.

“He was a good kid,” acknowledged Mark, “until he started running with those three from the Valley. They’ve got him hypnotized with that car and all their wild stories and crazy pranks. I guess he thinks their big-town fooling around has a glamor that can’t be duplicated here in the mountains. Thank heaven it can’t, but I wish he’d wise up to what’s happening to him.”

“The child!” Meris started toward the bed, her heart throbbing suddenly to the realization that there was a baby to be considered again. They looked down at the flushed, sleeping face and then turned back to the table. “She must he about three or four,” said Meris over the coffee cups. “And healthy and well cared for. Her clothes-” she glanced out at the clothes line where the laundry billowed and swung “they’re well-made, but “

“But what?” Mark stirred his coffee absently, then gulped a huge swallow.

“Well, look,” said Meris, reaching to the chair. “This outer thing she had on. It’s like a trundle bundle-arms but no legs-just a sleeping bag thing. That’s not too surprising, but look. I was going to rinse off the mud before I washed it, hut just one slosh in the water and it came out clean-and dry! I didn’t even have to hang it out. And Mark, it isn’t material. I mean fabric. At least it isn’t like any that I’ve ever seen.”

Mark lifted the garment, flexing a fold in his fingers.

“Odd,” he said.

“And look at the fasteners,” said Meris.

“There aren’t any,” he said, surprised.

“And yet it fastens,” said Meris, smoothing the two sections of the front together, edge to edge. She tugged mightily at it. It stayed shut. “You can’t rip it apart. But look here.” And she laid the two sides back gently with no effort at all.

“It seems to be which direction you pull. There’s a rip here in the back,” she went on. “Or I’ll bet she’d never have got wet at all-at least not from the outside,” she smiled. “Look, the rip was from here to here.” Her fingers traced six inches across the garment. “But look-” She carefully lapped the edges of the remaining rip and drew her thumb nail along it.

The material seemed to melt into itself and the rip was gone.

“How did you find out all this so soon?” asked Mark. “Your own research lab?”

“Maybe so,” smiled Meris. “I was just looking at it-women look at fabrics and clothing with their fingers, you know. I could never choose a piece of material for a dress without touching it. And I was wondering how much the seam would show if I mended it.” She shook the garment.

“But how she ever managed to run in it.”

“She didn’t,” said Mark. “She sort of fluttered around like a chicken. I thought she was a feathered thing at first. Every time I thought I had her, she got away, flopping and fluttering, above my head half the time. I don’t see how she ever-Oh! I found a place that might be where she spent the night. Looks like she crawled back among the roots of the deadfall at the bend of the creek. There’s a pressed down, grassy hollow, soggy wet, of course, just inches above the water.”

“I don’t understand this fluttering bit,” said Meris. “You mean she jumped so high you-“

“Not exactly jumped-” began Mark.

A sudden movement caught them both. The child had wakened, starting up with a terrified cry, “Muhlala! Muhlala!”

Before Meris could reach her, she was fluttering up from the bed, trailing the chenille robe beneath her. She hovered against the upper windowpane, like a moth, pushing her small hands against it, sobbing, “Muhlala! Muhlala!”

Meris gaped up at her. “Mark! Mark!”

“Not exactly-jump!” grunted Mark, reaching up for the child. He caught one of the flailing bare feet and pulled the child down into his arms, hushing her against him.

“There, there, muhlala, muhlala,” he comforted awkwardly.

“Muhlala?” asked Meris, taking the struggling child from him.

“Well, she said it first,” he said. “Maybe the familiarity will help.”

“Well, maybe,” said Meris. “There, there, muhlala, muhlala.”

The child quieted and looked up at Meris.

“Muhlala?” she asked hopefully.

“Muhlala,” said Meris as positively as she could.

The big wet eyes looked at her accusingly and the little head said no, unmistakably, but she leaned against Meris her weight suddenly doubling as she relaxed.

“Well now,” said Mark. “Back to work.”

“Work? Oh, Mark!” Meris was contrite. “I’ve broken into your workday again!”

“Well, it’s not every day I catch a child flying in the forest. I’ll make it up-somehow.”

Meris helped Mark get settled to his work and, dressing the child-“What’s your name, honey? What’s your name?”-in her own freshly dried clothes, she took her outside to leave Mark in peace.

“Muhlala,” said Meris, smiling down at the upturned wondering face. The child smiled and swung their linked hands.

“Muhlala!” she laughed.

“Okay,” said Meris, “we’ll call you Lala.” She skoonched down to child height. “Lala,” she said, prodding the small chest with her finger. “Lala!”

Lala looked solemnly down at her own chest, tucking her chin in tightly in order to see. “Lala,” she said, and giggled.

“Lala!”

The two walked toward the creek, Lala in the lead, firmly leashed by Meris’s hand. “No flying,” she warned. “I can’t interrupt Mark to have him fish you out of the treetops.”

Lala walked along the creek bank, peering down into the romping water and keeping up a running commentary of unintelligible words. Meris kept up a conversation of her own, fitting it into the brief pauses of Lala’s. Suddenly Lala cried out triumphantly and pointed. Meris peered down into the water.

“Well!” she cried indignantly. “Those darn boys! Dropping trash in our creek just because they’re mad at Mark. Tin cans-“

Lala was togging at her hand, pulling her toward the creek.

“Wait a bit, Lala,” laughed Meris. “You’ll fall us both into the water,”

Then she gasped and clutched Lala’s hand more firmly. Lala was standing on the water, the speed of the current ruffling it whitely against the sides of her tiny shoes. She was trying to tug Meris after her, across the water toward the metallic gleam by the other bank of the creek.

“No, baby,” said Meris firmly, pulling Lala back to the bank. “We’ll use the bridge.” So they did and Lala, impatient of delay, tried to free her hand so she could run along the creek bed, but Meris clung firmly. “Not without me!” she said.

When they arrived at the place where the metallic whatever lay under the water, Meris put Lala down firmly on a big gray granite boulder, back from the creek. “Stay there,” she said, pushing firmly down on the small shoulders. “Stay there.” Than she turned to the creek. Starting to wade, sneakers and all into the stream, she looked back at Lala. The child was standing on the boulder visibly wanting to come. Meris shook her head. “Stay there,” she repeated.

Lala’s face puckered but she sat down again. “Stay there,” she repeated unhappily.

Meris tugged and pulled at the metal, the icy bite of the creek water numbing her feet. “Must be an old hot water tank,” she grunted as she worked to drag it ashore. “When could they have dumped it here? We’ve been home-“

The current caught the thing as it let go of the mud at the bottom of the creek. It rolled and almost tore loose from Meris’s hands, but she clung, feeling a fingernail break, and, putting her back to the task, towed the thing out of the current into the shallows. She turned its gleaming length over to drain the water out through the rip down its side.

“Water tank?” she puzzled. “Not like any I ever-“

“Stay there?” cried Lala excitedly. “Stay there?” She was jumping up and down on the boulder.

Meris laughed. “Come here,” she said, holding out her muddy hands. “Come here!” Lala came. Meris nearly dropped her as she staggered under the weight of the child. Lala hadn’t bothered to slide down the boulder and run to her. She had launched herself like a little rocket, airborne the whole distance.

She wiggled out of Meris’s astonished arms and rummaging, head hidden in the metal capsule, came out with a triumphant cry, “Deeko! Deeko!” And she showed Meris her sodden treasure. It was a doll, a wet, muddy, battered doll, but a doll nevertheless, dressed in miniature duplication of Lala’s outer garment which they had left in the cabin.

Lala plucked at the wet folds of the doll’s clothes and made unhappy noises as she wiped the mud from the tiny face. She held the doll up to Meris, her voice asking and coaxing. So Meris squatted down by the child and together they undressed Deeko and washed her and her tiny clothes in the creek, then spread the clothes on the boulder in the sun. Lain gave Deeko a couple of soggy hugs, then put her on the rock also.

Just before supper, Mark came out to the creek-side to see the metallic object. He was still shaking his head in wonderment over the things Meris had told him of Lala. He would have discounted them about ninety per cent except that Lala did them all over again for him. When he saw the ripped cylinder, he stopped shaking his head and just stared for a moment. Then he was turning it, and exploring in it, head hidden, hefting the weight of it, flexing a piece of its ripped metal. Then he lounged against the gray boulder and lipped thoughtfully at a dry cluster of pine needles.

“Let’s live dangerously,” he said, “and assert that this is the How that Lala arrived in our vicinity last night. Let us further assert that it has no earthly origin. Therefore, let us, madly but positively, assert that this is a Space capsule of some sort and Lala is an extra-terrestrial.”

“You mean,” gasped Meris, “that Lala is a little green man! And that this is a flying saucer?”

“Well, yes,” said Mark. “Inexact, but it conveys the general idea.”

“But, Mark! She’s just a baby. She couldn’t possibly have traveled all that distance alone-“

“I’d say also that she couldn’t have traveled all that distance in this vehicle, either,” said Mark. “Point one, I don’t see anything resembling a motor or a fuel container or even a steering device. Point two, there are no provisions of any kind-water or food-or even any evidence of an air supply.”

“Then?” said Meris, deftly fielding Lala from the edge of the creek.

“I’d say-only as a guess—that this is a sort of lifeboat in case of a wreck. I’d say something happened in the storm last night and here’s Lala, Castaway.”

“Where did you come from, baby dear?” chanted Meris to the wiggly Lala. “The heavens opened and you were here?”

“They’ll be looking for her,” said Mark, “whoever her people are. Which means they’ll be looking for us.” He looked at Meris and smiled. “How does it feel, Mrs. Edwards, to be Looked For by denizens of Outer Space?”

“Should we try to find them?” asked Meris. “Should we call the sheriff?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mark. “Let’s wait a day or so. They’ll find her. I’m sure of it. Anyone who had a Lala would comb the whole state, inch by inch, until they found her.”

He caught up Lala and tossed her, squealing, into the air. For the next ten minutes Mark and Meris were led a merry chase trying to get Lala down out of the trees! Out of the sky! She finally fluttered down into Meris’s arms and patted her cheek with a puzzled remark of some kind:

“I suppose,” said Mark, taking a relieved breath, “that she’s wondering how come we didn’t chase her up there. Well, small one, you’re our duckling. Don’t laugh at our unwebbed feet.”

That evening Meris. sat rocking a drowsy-eyed Lala to sleep. She reached to tuck the blanket closer about the small bare feet, but instead cradled one foot in her hand. “You know what, Mark?” she said softly. “It’s just dawned on me what you were saying about Lala. You were saying that this foot might have walked on another world! It just doesn’t seem possible!”

“Well, try this thought, then.” Mark pushed back from his desk, stretching widely and yawning. “If that world was very far away or their speed not too fast, that foot may never have touched a world anywhere. She may have been born en route.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Meris, “she knows too much about-about-things for that to be so. She knew to look in water for that-that vehicle of hers and she knew to wash her doll in running water and to spread clothes in the sun to dry. If she’d lived her life in Space-“

“Hmm!” Mark tapped his mouth with his pencil. “You could be right, but there might be other explanations for her knowledge. But then, maybe the real explanation of Lala is a very pedestrian one.” He smiled at her unbelieving smile and went back to work.

Meris was awake again in the dark. She stretched comfortably and smiled. How wonderful to be able to awaken in the dark and smile instead of slipping inevitably into the aching endless grief and despair. How pleasant to be able to listen to Mark’s deep breathing and Lala’s little murmur as she turned on the camp cot beside the bed. How warm and relaxing the flicker of firelight from the cast-iron stove patterning ceiling and walls dimly. She yawned and stopped in mid-stretch. What was that? Was that what had wakened her?

There was a guarded thump on the porch, a fumbling at the door, an audible breath and then, “Mr. Edwards! Are you there?” The voice was a forced whisper.

Meris’s hand closed on Mark’s shoulder. He shrugged away in his sleep, but as her lingers tightened, he came wide awake, listening.

“Mr. Edwards!”

“Someone for Lala!” Meris gasped and reached toward the sleeping child.

“No,” said Mark. “It’s Tad Winstel.” He lifted his voice.

“Just a minute, Tad!” There was a muffled cry at the door and then silence. Mark padded barefoot to the door, blinking as he snapped the lights on, and, unlatching the door, swung it open. “Come on in, fellow, and close the door. It’s cold.” He shivered back for his jacket and sneakers.

Tad slipped in and stood awkwardly thin and lanky by the door, hugging his arms to himself convulsively. Mark opened the stove and added a solid chunk of oak.

“What brings you here at this hour?” he asked calmly.

Tad shivered. “It isn’t you, then,” he said, “but it’s bad trouble. You told me that gang was no good to mess around with. Now I know it. Can they hang me for just being there?” His voice was very young and shaken.

“Come over here and get warm,” said Mark. “For being where?”

“In the car when it killed the guy.”

“Killed!” Mark fumbled the black lid-lifter. “What happened?”

“We were out in that Porsche of Rick’s, just tearing around seeing how fast it could take that winding road on the other side of Sheep’s Bluff.” Tad gulped. “They called me chicken because I got scared. And I am! I saw Mr. Stegemeir after his pickup went off the road by the fish hatchery last year and I-I can’t help remembering it. Well, anyway-” His voice broke off and he gulped. “Well, they made such good time that they got to feeling pretty wild and decided to come over on this road and-” His eyes dropped away from Mark’s and his feet moved apologetically. “They wanted to find some way to get back at you again.”

Then his words tumbled out in a wild spurt of terror. “All at once there was this man. Out of nowhere! Right in the road! And we hit him! And knocked him clear off the road. And they weren’t even going to stop, but I gabbed the key and made them! I made them back up and I got out to look for the man. I found him. All bloody. Lying in the bushes. I tried to find out where he was bleeding-they-they went off and left me there with him!” His voice was outraged. “They didn’t give a darn about that poor guy! They went off and left him lying there and me with not even a flashlight!”

Mark had been dressing rapidly. “He may not be dead,” he said, reaching for his cap. “How far is he?”

“The other side of the creek bridge,” said Tad. “We came the Rim way. Do you think he might-“

“We’ll see,” said Mark. “Meris, give me one of those army blankets and get Lala off the cot. We’ll use that for a stretcher. Build the fire up and check the first aid kit.” He got the Coleman lantern from the storeroom, then he and Tad gathered up the canvas cot and went out into the chilly darkness.

Lala fretted a little, then, curled in the warmth Mark had left, she slept again through all the bustling about as Meris prepared for Mark’s return.

Meris ran to the door when she heard their feet in the yard. She flung the outer door wide and held the screen as they edged the laden cot through the door. “Is he-?”

“Don’t think so.” Mark grunted as they lowered the cot to the floor. “Still bleeding from the cut on his head and I don’t think dead men bleed. Not this long, anyway. Get a gauze pad, Meris, and put pressure on the cut. Tad, get his boots off while I get his shirt “

Meris glanced up from her bandage as Mark’s voice broke off abruptly. He was staring at the shirt. His eyes caught Meris’s and he ran a finger down the front of the shirt. No buttons. Meris’s mouth opened, but Mark shook his head warningly. Then, taking hold of the muddied shirt, he gently tuned both sides back away from the chest that was visibly laboring now.

Meris’s hands followed the roll of the man’s head, keeping the bandage in place, but her eyes were on the bed where Lala had turned away from the light and was burrowed nearly out of sight under the edge of Mark’s pillow.

Tad spoke from where he was struggling with the man’s boots. “I thought it was you, Mr. Edwards,” he said. “I nearly passed out when you answered the door. Who else could it have been? No one else lives way out here and I couldn’t see his face. I knew he was bleeding because my hands-” He broke off as one boot thumped to the floor.

“And we knocked him so far! So high! And I thought it was you!” He shuddered and huddled over the other boot. “I’m cured, honest, Mr. Edwards. I’m cured. Only don’t let him die. Don’t let him die!” He was crying now, unashamed.

“I’m no doctor,” said Mark, “but I don’t think he’s badly hurt. Lots of scratches, but that cut on his head seems to he the worst.”

“The bleeding’s nearly stopped,” said Meris. “And his eyes are fluttering.”

Even as she spoke, the eyes opened, dark and dazed, the head turning restlessly. Mark leaned over the man. “Hello,” he said, trying to get the eyes to focus on him. “You’re okay. You’re okay. Only a cut-“

The man’s head stilled. He blinked and spoke, his eyes closing before his words were finished.

“What did he say?” asked Tad. “What did he say?”

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “And he’s gone again. To sleep, this time, I hope. I’m quite sure he isn’t dying.”

Later when Mark was satisfied that the man was sleeping, in the warm pajamas he and Tad had managed to wrestle him into, he got dressed in clean clothes and had Tad wash up, and put on a clean flannel shirt in place of his bloodstained one.

“We’re going to the sheriff, after we find the doctor,” he told Tad. “We’re going to have to take care of those kids before they do kill someone or themselves. And you, Tad, are going to have to put the finger on them whether you like it or not. You’re the only witness-“

“But if I do, then I’ll get in trouble, too-” began Tad.

“Look, Tad,” said Mark patiently, “if you walk in mud, you get your feet muddy. You knew when you got involved with these fellows that you were wading in mud. Maybe you thought it didn’t matter much. Mud is easy to wash off. That might be true of mud, but what about blood?”

“But Rick’s not a juvenile any more-” Tad broke off before the grim tightening of Mark’s face.

“So that’s what they’ve been trading on. So he’s legally accountable now? Nasty break!”

After they were gone, Meris checked the sleeping man again. Then, crawling into bed, shoving Lala gently toward the back of the bunk, she cuddled, shivering under the bedclothes. She became conscious of the steady outflow of warmth from Lala and smiled as she fanned her cold hands out under the cover toward the small body. “Bless the little heater!” she said. Her eyes were sleepy and closed in spite of her, but her mind still raced with excitement and wonder. What if Mark was right? What if Lala had come from a spaceship! What if this man, sleeping under their own blankets on their own cot, patched by their own gauze and adhesive, was really a Man from Outer Space! Wouldn’t that be something? “But,” she sighed, “no bug-eyed monsters? No set, staring eyes and slavering teeth?” She smiled at herself. She had been pretty bug-eyed herself, when she had seen his un-unbuttonable shirt.

Dr. Hilf arrived, large, loud, and lively, before Meris got back to sleepin fact, while she was in the middle of her Bless Mark, bless Tad, bless Lala, bless the bandaged man, bless-He examined the silently cooperative man thoroughly, rebandaged his head and a few of the deeper scratches, grabbed a cup of coffee, and boomed, “Doesn’t look to me as if he’s been hit by a car! Aspirin if his head aches. No use wasting stitches where they aren’t needed!” His voice woke Lala and she sat up, blinking silently at him. “He’s not much worried himself! Asleep already! That’s an art!” The doctor gave Meris a practiced glance. “Looking half alive again yourself, young lady. Good idea having a child around. Your niece?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Good to help hold the place until you get another of your own!” Meris winced away from the idea. The doctor’s eyes softened, but not his voice.

“There’ll be others,” he boomed. “We need offspring from good stock like yours and Mark’s. Leaven for a lot of the makeweights popping up all over.” He gathered up his things and flung the door open. “Mark says the fellow’s a foreigner. No English. Understood though. Let me know his name when you get it. Just curious. Mark’ll be along pretty quick. Waiting for the sheriff to get the juvenile officers from county seat.” The house door slammed. A ear door slammed. A car roared away. Meris automatically smoothed her hair, as she always did after a conversation with Dr. Hilf.

She turned wearily back toward the bunk. And gasping, stumbled forward. Lala was hovering in the air over the strange man like a flannelled angel over a tombstoned crusader. She was peering down, her bare feet flipping up as she lowered her head toward him. Meris clenched her hands and made herself keep back out of the way.

“Muhlala!” whispered Lala, softly. Then louder, “Muhlala!” Then she wailed, “Muhlala!’” and thumped herself down on the quiet, sleeping chest.

“Well,” said Meris aloud to herself as she collapsed on the edge of the bunk. “There seems to be no doubt about it!” She watched-a little enviously-the rapturous reunion, and listened-more than a little curiously-to the flood of strange-sounding double conversation going on without perceptible pauses. Smiling, she brought tissues for the man to mop his face after Lala’s multitude of very moist kisses. The man was sitting up now, holding Lala closely to him. He smiled at Meris and then down at Lala. Lala looked at Meris and then patted the man’s chest.

“Muhlala,” she said happily, “muhlala!” and burrowed her head against him.

Meris laughed. “No wonder you thought it funny when I called you muhlala,” she said. “l wonder what Lala means.”

“It means ‘daddy,’” said the man. “She is quite excited about being called daddy.”

Meris swallowed her surprise. “Then you do have English,” she said.

“A little,” said the man. “As you give it to me. Oh, I am Johannan.” He sagged then, and said something un-English to Lala. She protested, but even protesting, lifted herself out of his arms and back to the bunk, after planting a last smacking kiss on his right ear. The man wiped the kiss away and held his drooping head between his hands.

“I don’t wonder,” said Meris, going to the medicine shelf.

“Aspirin for your headache.” She shook two tablets into his hand and gave him a glass of water. He looked bewilderedly from one hand to the other.

“Oh dear,” said Meris. “Oh well, I can use one myself,” and she took an aspirin and a glass of water and showed him how to dispose of them. The man smiled and gulped the tablets down. He let Meris take the glass, slid flat on the cot, and was breathing asleep before Meris could put the glass in the sink.

“Well!” she said to Lala and stood her, curly-toed, on the cold floor and straightened the bedclothes. “Imagine a grown-up not knowing what to do with an aspirin! And now,” she plumped Lala into the freshly made bed, “now, my Daddy-girl, shall we try that instant sleep bit?”

The next afternoon, Meris and Lala lounged in the thin warm sunshine near the creek with Johannan. In the piny, water-loud clearing, empty of unnecessary conversation, Johannan drowsed and Lala alternately bandaged her doll and unbandaged it until all the stickum was off the tape. Merle watched her with that sharp awareness that comes so often before an unwished-for parting from one you love. Then, with an almost audible click, afternoon became evening and the shadows were suddenly long. Mark came out of the cabin, stretching his desk-kinked self widely, then walking his own long shadow down to the creek bank.

“Almost through,” he said to Meris as he folded himself to the ground beside her. “By the end of the week, barring fire, flood, and the cussedness of man, I’ll be able to send it off.”

“I’m so glad,” said Meris, her happiness welling strongly up inside her. “I was afraid my foolishness-“

“The foolishness is all past now,” said Mark. “It is remembered against us no more.”

Johannan had sat up at Mark’s approach. He smiled now and said carefully, “I’m glad my child and I haven’t interrupted your work too much. It would be a shame if our coming messed up things for you.”

“You have a surprising command of the vernacular if English is not your native tongue,” said Mark, his interest in Johannan suddenly sharpening.

“We have a knack for languages,” smiled Johannan, not really answering anything.

“How on earth did you come to lose Lala?” Meris asked, amazed at herself for asking such a direct question.

Johannan’s face sobered. “That was quite a deal-losing a child in a thunderstorm over a quarter of a continent.” He touched Lala’s cheek softly with his finger as she patiently tried to make the worn-out tape stick again on Deeko. “It was partly her fault,” said Johannan, smiling ruefully. “If she weren’t precocious-You see, we do not come into the atmosphere with the large ship-too many complications about explanations and misinterpretations and a very real danger from trigger-happy-or unhappy-military, so we use our life-slips for landings.”

“We?” murmured Meris.

“Our People,” said Johannan simply. “Of course there’s no Grand Central Station of the Sky. We are very sparing of our comings and goings. Lala and I were returning because Lala’s mother has been Called and it is best to bring Lala to Earth to her grandparents.”

“Her mother was called?” asked Mark.

“Back to the Presence,” said Johannan. “Our years together were very brief.” His face closed smoothly over his sorrow. “We move our life-slips,” he went on after a brief pause, “without engines. It is an adult ability, to bring the life-slips through the atmosphere to land at the Canyon. But Lala is precocious in many Gifts and Persuasions and she managed to jerk her life-slip out of my control on the way down. I followed her into the storm-” He gestured and smiled. He had finished.

“But where were you headed?” asked Mark. “Where on earth-?”

“On Earth,” Johannan smiled. “There is a Group of the People. More than one Group, they say. They have been here, we know, since the end of the last century. My wife was of Earth. She returned to the New Home on the ship we sent to Earth for the refugees. She and I met on the New Home. I am not familiar with Earth-that’s why, though I was oriented to locate the Canyon from the air, I am fairly thoroughly lost to it from the ground.”

“Mark,” Meris leaned over and tapped Mark’s knee. “He thinks he has explained everything.”

Mark laughed. “Maybe he has. Maybe we just need a few years for absorption and amplification. Questions, Mrs. Edwards?”

“Yes,” said Meris, her hand softly on Lala’s shoulder.

“When are you leaving, Johannan?”

“I must first find the Group,” said Johannan. “So, if Lala could stay-” Meris’s hands betrayed her. “For a little while longer,” he emphasized. “It would help.”

“Of course,” said Meris. “Not ours to keep.”

“The boys,” said Johannan suddenly. “Those in the ear. There was a most unhealthy atmosphere. It was an accident, of course. I tried to lift out of the way, but I was taken unawares. But there was little concern-“

“There will be,” said Mark grimly. “Their hearing is Friday.”

“There was one,” said Johannan slowly, “who felt pain and compassion-“

“Tad,” said Meris. “He doesn’t really belong-“

“But he associated-“

“Yes,” said Mark, “consent by silence.”

The narrow, pine-lined road swept behind the car, the sunlight flicking across the hood like pale, liquid pickets. Lala bounced on Meris’s lap, making excited, unintelligible remarks about the method of transportation and the scenery going by the windows. Johannan sat in the back seat being silently absorbed in his new world. The trip to town was a three-fold expedition-to attend the hearing for the boys involved in the accident-to start Johannan on his search for the Group, and to celebrate the completion of Mark’s manuscript.

They had left it blockily beautiful on the desk, awaiting the triumphant moment when it would be wrapped and sent on its way and when Mark would suddenly have large quantifies of uncommitted time on his hands for the first time in years.

“What is it?” Johannan had asked.

“His book,” said Meris. “A reference textbook for one of those frightening new fields that are in the process of developing. I can’t even remember its name, let alone understand what it’s about.”

Mark laughed. “I’ve explained a dozen times. I don’t think she wants to remember. The book’s to be used by a number of universities for their textbook in the field if, if it can be ready for next year’s classes. If it can’t be available in time, another one will be used and all the concentration of years.—” He was picking up Johannan’s gesture.

“So complicated-” said Meris.

“Oh yes,” said Johannan. “Earth’s in the complication stage.”

“Complication stage?” asked Meris.

“Yes,” said Johannan. “See that tree out there? Simplicity says-a tree. Then wonder sets in and you begin to analyze it-cells growth, structure, leaves, photosynthesis, roots, bark, rings-on and on until the tree is a mass of complications. Then, finally, with reservations not quite to be removed, you can put it back together again and sigh in simplicity once more-a tree. You’re in the complication period in the world now.”

“Is true!” laughed Mark. “Is true!”

“Just put the world back together again, someday,” said Meris, soberly.

“Amen,” said the two men.

But now the book was at the cabin and they were in town for a day that was remarkable for its widely scattered, completely unorganized, confusion. It started off with Lala, in spite of her father’s warning words, leaving the car through the open window, headlong, without waiting for the door to be opened. A half a block of pedestrians-five to be exact-rushed to congregate in expectation of blood and death, to be angered in their relief by Lala’s laughter, which lit her eyes and bounced her dark curls. Johannan snatched her back into the car-forgetting to take hold of her in the process-and un-Englished at her severely, his brief gestures making clear what would happen to her if she disobeyed again.

The hearing for the boys crinkled Meris’s shoulders unpleasantly. Rick appeared with the minors in the course of the questioning and glanced at Mark the whole time, his eyes flicking hatefully back and forth across Mark’s face. The gathered parents were an unhappy, uncomfortable bunch, each overreacting according to his own personal pattern and the boys either echoing or contradicting the reactions of their own parents. Meris wished herself out of the whole unhappy mess.

Midway in the proceedings, the door was flung open and Johannan, who had left with a wiggly Lala as soon as his small part was over, gestured at Mark and Meris and un-Englished at them across the whole room. The two left, practically running, under the astonished eyes of the judge and, leaning against the securely closed outside door, looked at Johanann. After he understood their agitation and had apologized in the best way he could pluck from their thoughts, he said, “I had a thought.” He shifted Lala, squirming, to his other arm. “The-the doctor who came to look at my head-he-he-” He gulped and started again. “All the doctors have ties to each other, don’t they?”

“Why I guess so,” said Meris, rescuing Lala and untangling her brief skirts from under her armpits. “There’s a medical society-“

“That is too big,” said Johannan after a hesitation. “I mean, Dr.-Dr.-Hilf would know other doctors in this part of the country?” His voice was a question.

“Sure he would,” said Mark. “He’s been around here since Territorial days. He knows everyone and his dog-including a lot of the summer people.”

“Well,” said Johannan, “there is a doctor who knows my People. At least there was. Surely he must still be alive. He knows the Canyon. He could tell me.”

“Was he from around here?” asked Mark.

“I’m not sure where here is,” Johannan reminded, “but a hundred miles or so one way or the other.”

“A hundred miles isn’t much out here,” confirmed Meris. “Lots of times you have to drive that far to get anywhere.”

“What was the doctor’s name?” asked Mark, snatching for Lala as she shot up out of Meris’s arms in pursuit of a helicopter that clacked overhead. He grasped one ankle and pulled her down. Grim-faced, Johannan took Lala from him.

“Excuse me,” he said, and, facing Lala squarely to him on one arm, he held her face still and looked at her firmly. In the brief silence that followed, Lala’s mischievous smile faded and her face crumpled into sadness and then to tears. She flung herself upon her father, clasping him around his neck and wailing heartbrokenly, her face pushed hard against his shoulder. He un-Englished at her tenderly for a moment, then said, “You see why it is necessary for Lala to come to her grandparents? They are Old Ones and know how to handle such precocity. For her own protection she should be among the People.”

“Well, cherub,” said Mark, retrieving her from Johannan, “let’s go salve your wounded feelings with an ice cream cone.”

They sat at one of the tables in the back of one of the general stores and laughed at Lala’s reaction to ice cream; then, with her securely involved with two straws and a glass full of crushed ice, they returned to the topic under discussion.

“The only way they ever referred to the doctor was just Doctor-“

He was interrupted by the front door slapping open. Shelves rattled. A can of corn dropped from a pyramid and rolled across the floor. “Dern fool summer people!” trumpeted Dr. Hilf. “Sit around all year long at sea-level getting exercise with a knife and fork then come roaring up here and try to climb Devil’s Slide eleven thousand feet up in one morning!”

Then he saw the group at the table. “Well! How’d the hearing go?” he roared, making his way rapidly and massively toward them as he spoke. The three exchanged looks of surprise, then Mark said, “We weren’t in at the verdict.” He started to get up. “I’ll phone-“

“Never mind,” boomed Dr. Hilf. “Here comes Tad.” They made room at the table for Tad and Dr. Hill.

“We’re on probation,” confessed Tad. “I felt about an inch high when the judge got through with us. I’ve had it with that outfit!” He brooded briefly. “Back to my bike, I guess, until I can afford my own car. Chee!” He gazed miserably at the interminable years ahead of him. Maybe even five!

“What about Rick?” asked Mark.

“Lost his license,” said Tad uncomfortably. “For six months, anyway. Gee, Mr. Edwards, he’s sure mad at you now. I guess he’s decided to blame you for everything.”

“He should have learned long ago to blame himself for his own misdoings,” said Meris. “Rick was a spoiled-rotten kid long before he ever came up here.”

“Mark’s probably the first one ever to make him realize that he was a brat,” said Dr. Hill. “That’s plenty to build a hate on.”

“Walking again!” muttered Tad. “So okay! So t’heck with wheels!”

“Well, since you’ve renounced the world, the flesh, and Porsches,” smiled Mark, “maybe you could beguile the moments with learning about vintage cars. There’s plenty of them still functioning around here.”

“Vintage cars?” said Tad. “Never heard of them. Imports?”

Mark laughed, “Wait. I’ll get you a magazine.” He made a selection from the magazine rack in back of them and plopped it down in front of Tad. “There. Read up. There might be a glimmer of light to brighten your dreary midnight.”

“Dr. Hilf,” said Johannan, “I wonder if you would help me.”

“English!” bellowed Dr. Hilf. “Thought you were a foreigner! You don’t look as if you need help! Where’s your head wound? No right to be healed already!”

“It’s not medical,” said Johannan. “‘I’m trying to find a doctor friend of mine. Only I don’t know his name or where he lives.”

“Know what state he lives in?” Laughter rumbled from Dr. Hilf.

“No,” confessed Johannan, “but I do know he is from this general area and I thought you might know of him. He has helped my People in the past.”

“And your people are-” asked Dr. Hilf.

“Excuse me, folks,” said Tad, unwinding his long legs and folding the magazine back on itself. “There’s my dad, ready to go. I’m grounded. Gotta tag along like a kid. Thanks for everything-and the magazine.” And he dejectedly trudged away.

Dr. Hilf was waiting on Johannan, who was examining his own hands intently. “I know so little,” said Johannan. “The doctor cared for a small boy with a depressed fracture of the skull. He operated in the wilderness with only the instruments he had with him.” Dr. Hilf’s eyes flicked to Johannan’s face and then away again. “But that was a long way from where he found one of Ours who could make music and was going wrong because he didn’t know who he was.”

Dr. Hilf waited for Johannan to continue. When he didn’t, the doctor pursed his lips and hummed massively.

“I can’t help much,” said Johannan, finally, “but are there so many doctors who live in the wilds of this area?”

“None,” boomed Dr. Hilf. “I’m the farthest out-if I may use that loaded expression. Out in these parts, a sick person has three choices-die, get well on his own, or call me. Your doctor must have come from some town.”

It was a disconsolate group that headed back up-canyon. Their mood even impressed itself on Lala and she lay silent and sleepy-eyed in Meris’s arms, drowsing to the hum of the car.

Suddenly Johannan leaned forward and put his hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Would you stop, please?” he asked. Mark pulled off the road onto the nearest available flat place, threading expertly between scrub oak and small pines. “Let me take Lala.” And Lala lifted over the back of the seat without benefit of hands upon her. Johannan sat her up on his lap. “Our People have a highly developed racial memory,” he said. “For instance, I have access to the knowledge any of our People have known since the Bright Beginning, and, in lesser measure, to the events that have happened to any of them. Of course, unless you have studied the technique of recall it is difficult to take knowledge from the past, but it’s there, available. I am going to see if I can get Lala to recall for me. Maybe her precocity will include recollection also.” He looked down at his nestling child and smiled. “It won’t be spectacular,” he said, “no eyeballs will light up. I’m afraid it’ll be tedious for you, especially since it will be subvocal. Lala’s spoken vocabulary lags behind her other Gifts. You can drive on, if you like.” And he leaned back with Lala in his arms. The two to all appearances were asleep.

Meris looked at Mark and Mark looked at Meris, and Meris felt an irrepressible bubble of laughter start up her throat. She spoke hastily to circumvent it.

“Your manuscript,” she said.

“I got a box for it,” said Mark easing out onto the road again. “Chip found one for me when you took Lala to the rest room. Couldn’t have done better if I’d had it made to measure. What a weight-” he yawned in sudden release-“What a weight off my mind. I’ll be glad when it’s off my hands, too. Thank God! Thank God it’s finished!”

The car was topping the Rim when Johannan stirred, and a faint twitter of release came from Lala. Meris turned sideways to look at them inquiringly.

“May I get out?” asked Johannan. “Lala has recalled enough that I think my search won’t be too long.”

“I’ll drive you back,” said Mark, pulling up by the road.

“Thanks, but it won’t be necessary.” Johannan opened the door and, after a tight embrace for Lala and an un-English word or two, stepped out. “I have ways of going. If you will care for Lala until I return.”

“Of course!” said Meris, reaching for the child who flowed over the back of the seat into her arms in one complete motion. “God bless, and return soon.”

“Thank you,” said Johannan and walked into the roadside bushes. They saw a ripple in the branches, the turn of a shoulder, the flick of a foot, one sharp startling glimpse of Johannan rising against the blue and white of the afternoon sky and then he was hidden in the top branches of the trees.

“Shoosh!” Meris slumped under Lala’s entire weight.

“Mark, is this a case of folie a deux, or is it really happening?”

“Well,” said Mark, starting the car again. “I doubt if we two could achieve the same hallucinations simultaneously, so let’s assume it’s really happening.”

When they finally reached the cabin and stopped the motor, they sat for a moment in the restful, active silence of the hills. Meris, feeling the soft warmth of Lala against her and the precious return of things outside herself, shivered a little remembering her dead self who had stared so blankly so many hours out of the small windows, tearlessly crying, soundlessly wailing, wrapped in misery. She laughed and hugged Lala. “Maybe we should get a leash for this small person,” she said to Mark. “I don’t think I could follow in Johannan’s footsteps.”

“Supper first,” said Mark as he fumbled with the padlock on the cabin door. He glanced, startled, back over his shoulder at Meris. “It’s broken,” he said. “Wrenched open-” He flung the door open hastily, and froze on the doorstep. Meris pushed forward to look beyond him.

Snow had fallen in the room-snow covered everything-a smudged, crumpled snow of paper, flour, sugar, and detergent. Every inch of the cabin was covered by the tattered, soaked, torn, crumpled snow of Mark’s manuscript! Mark stooped slowly, like an old man, and took up one page. Mingled detergent and maple syrup clung, clotted, and slithered off the edge of one of the diagrams that had taken two days to complete. He let the page fall and shuffled forward, ankle-deep in the obscene, incredible chaos. Meris hardly recognized the face he turned to her.

“I’ve lost our child again,” he said tightly. “This-” he gestured at the mess about them “-this was my weeping and my substitute for despair. My creation to answer death.”

He backhanded a clutter of papers off the bunk and slumped down until he lay, face to the wall, motionless.

Mark said not a word nor turned around in the hours that followed. Meris thought perhaps he slept at times, but she said nothing to him as she cautiously scrabbled through the mess in the cabin. She found, miraculously undamaged, a chapter and a half of pages under the cupboard. With careful hands she salvaged another sheaf of papers from where they had sprayed across the top of the cupboard. All the time she searched and sorted through the mess in the cabin, Lala sat, unnaturally well behaved and solemn, and watched her, getting down only once to salvage Deeko from a mound of sugar and detergent, clucking unhappily as she dusted the doll off.

It was late and cold when Meris put the last ruined sheet in the big cardboard box they had carried groceries home in, and the last salvageable sheet on the desk. She looked silently at the clutter in the box and the slender sheaf on the desk, shivered and turned to build up the dying fire in the stove. Her mouth tightened and the sullen flicker of charring, wadded paper in the stove painted age and pain upon her face. She stirred the embers with the lid-lifter and rebuilt the fire. She prepared supper, fed Lala, and put her to bed. Then she sat on the edge of the lower bunk by Mark’s rigid back and touched him gently.

“Supper’s ready,” she said. “Then I’ll need some help in scrubbing up-the floor, the walls, the furniture.” She choked on a sound that was half laughter and half sob. “There’s plenty of detergent around already. We may bubble ourselves out of house and home.”

For a sick moment she was afraid he wouldn’t respond. Just like l was, she thought achingly. Just like l was! Then he sat up slowly, brushed his arm back across his expressionless face and his rumpled hair, and stood up.

When they finally threw out the last bucket of scrub water and hung out the last scrub rag, Meris rubbed her water-wrinkled hands down her weary sides and said, “Tomorrow we’ll start on the manuscript again.”

“No,” said Mark. “That’s all finished. The boys got carbon-copy and all. It would take weeks for me to do a rewrite if I could ever do it. We don’t have weeks. My leave of absence is over, and the deadline for the manuscript is this next week. We’ll just have to chalk this up as lost. Let the dead past bury the dead.”

He went to bed, his face turned again from the light.

Meris, through the blur of her slow tears, gathered up the crumpled pages that had pulled out with the blankets from the back of the bunk, smoothed them onto the salvage pile, and went to bed, too.

For the next couple of days Mark was like an old man. He sat against the cabin wall in the sun, his arms resting on his thighs, his hands dangling from limp wrists, looking at the nothing that the senile and finished find on the ground. He moved slowly and reluctantly to the table to push his food around, to bed to lie, hardly breathing, but wide-eyed in the dark, to whatever task Meris set him, forgetting in the middle of it what be was doing.

Lala followed him at first, chattering un-English at her usual great rate, leaning against him when he sat, peering into his indifferent face. Then she stopped talking to him and followed him only with her eyes. Then the third day she came crying into Meris’s arms and wept heartbrokenly against her shoulder.

Then her tears stopped, glistened on her cheeks a moment, and were gone. She squirmed out of Meris’s embrace and trotted to the window. She pushed a chair up close to the wall, climbed up on it, pressed her forehead to the chilly glass and stared out into the late afternoon.

Tad came over on his bike, bubbling over with the new idea of old cars.

“Why, there’s parts of a whole bunch of these cars all over around here-” he cried, fluttering the tattered magazine at Mark. “And have you seen how much they’re asking for some of them! Why I could put myself through college on used parts out of our old dumps! And some of these vintage jobs are still running around here! Kiltie has a model A-you’ve seen it! He shines it like a new shoe every week! And there’s an old Overland touring car out in back of our barn, just sitting there, falling apart-“

Mark’s silence got through to him then, and he asked, troubled, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me for something?”

Meris spoke into Mark’s silence. “No, Tad, it’s nothing you’ve done-” She took him outside, ostensibly to help bring in wood to fill the woodbox and frilled him in on the events. When they returned, loaded down with firewood, he dumped his armload into the box and looked at Mark.

“Gee, whiz, Mr. Edwards. Uh-uh-gee whiz!” He gathered up his magazine and his hat and, shuffling his feet for a moment said, “Well, ‘bye now,” and left, grimacing back at Meris, wordless.

Lala was still staring out the window. She hadn’t moved or made a sound while Tad was there. Meris was frightened.

“Mark!” She shook his arm gently. “Look at Lala. She’s been like that for almost an hour. She pays no attention to me at all. Mark!”

Mark’s attention came slowly back to the cabin and to Meris.

“Thank goodness!” she cried. “I was beginning to feel that I was the one that was missing!”

At that moment, Lala plopped down from the chair and trotted off to the bathroom, a round red spot marking her forehead where she had leaned so long.

“Well!” Meris was pleased. “It must be suppertime. Every one’s gathering around again.” And she began the bustle of supper-getting. Lala trotted around with her, getting in the way, hindering with her help.

“No, Lala!” said Meris, “I told you once already. Only three plates. Here, put the other one over there.” Lala took the plate, waited patiently until Meris turned to the stove, then, lifting both feet from the floor, put the plate back on the table. The soft click of the flatware as she patterned it around the plate, caught Meris’s attention. “Oh, Lala!” she cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated. “Well, all right. If you can’t count, okay. Four it will be.” She started convulsively and dropped a fork as a knock at the door roused even Mark. “Hungry guest coming,” she laughed nervously as she picked up the fork. “Well, stew stretches.”

She started for the door, fear, bred of senseless violence, crisping along her spine, but Lala was ahead of her, fluttering like a bird, with excited bird cries against the door panels, her hands fumbling at the knob and the night chain Meris had insisted on installing. Meris unfastened and unlocked and opened the door.

It was Johannan, anxious-eyed and worried, who slipped in and gathered up a shrieking Lala. When he had finally un-Englished her to a quiet, contented clinging, he turned to Meris. “Lala called me back,” he said. “I’ve found my Group. She told me Mark was sick-that bad things had happened.”

“Yes,” said Meris, stirring the stew and moving it to the back of the stove. “The boys came while we were gone and ruined Mark’s manuscript beyond salvage. And Mark-Mark is crushed. He lost all those months of labor through sense less, vindictive-” She turned away from Johannan’s questioning face and stirred the stew again, blindly.

“But,” protested Johannan, “if once it was written, he has it still. He can do it again.”

“Time is the factor:” Mark’s voice, rusty and harsh, broke in on Johannan. “And to rewrite from my notes-” He shook his head and sagged again.

“But-but-!” cried Johannan still puzzled, putting Lala to one side, where she hovered, sitting on air, crooning to Deeko, until she drifted slowly down to the floor. “It’s all there! It’s been written! It’s a whole thing! All you have to do is put it again on paper. Your word scriber-“

“I don’t have total recall,” said Mark. “Even if I did, just to put it on paper again-come see our ‘word scriber.’” He smiled a small bent smile as Johannan poked fingers into the mechanism of the typewriter and clucked unhappily, sounding so like Lala that Meris almost laughed. “Such slowness! Such complications!”

Johannan looked at Mark. “If you want, my People can help you get your manuscript back again.”

“It’s finished,” said Mark. “Why agonize over it any more?” He turned to the blank darkness of the window.

“Was it worth the effort of writing?” asked Johannan.

“I thought so,” said Mark. “And others did, too.”

“Would it have served a useful purpose?” asked Johannan.

“Of course it would have!” Mark swung angrily from the window. “It covered an area that needs to be covered. It was new-the first book in the field!” He turned again to the window.

“Then,” said Johannan simply, “we will make it again. Have you paper enough?”

Mark swung back, his eyes glittering. Meris stepped between his glare and Johannan. “This summer I have come back from the dead,” she reminded. “And you caught a baby for me, pulling her down from the sky by one ankle. Johannan went looking for his people through the treetops. And a three-year-old called him back by leaning against the window. If all these things could happen, why can’t Johannan bring your manuscript back?”

“But if he tries and can’t-” Mark began.

“Then we can let the dead past bury the dead,” said Meris sharply, “which little item you have not been letting happen so far!”

Mark stared at her, then flushed a deep, painful flush.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Stir the bones again! Let him put meat back on them if he can!”

The next few hours were busy with patterned confusion. Mark roared off through the gathering darkness to persuade Chip to open the store for typing paper. And people arrived. Just arrived, smiling, at the door, familiar friends before they spoke, and Meris, glancing out to see if the heavens them selves had split open from astonishment saw, hovering treetop high, a truly vintage car, an old pickup that clanked softly to itself, spinning a wheel against a branch as it waited.

“If Tad could see that!” she thought, with a bubble of laughter nudging her throat.

She hurried back indoors further to make welcome the newcomers-Valancy, Karen, Davy, Jemmy. The women gathered Lala in with soft cries and shining eyes and she wept briefly upon them in response to their emotions, then leaped upon the fellows and nearly strangled them with her hugs.

Johannan briefed the four in what had happened and what was needed. They discussed the situation, glanced at the few salvaged pages on the desk and sent, eyes closed briefly, for someone else. His name was Remy and he had a special “Gift” for plans and diagrams. He arrived just before Mark got back, so the whole group of them confronted him when he flung the door open and stood there with his bundle of paper.

He blinked, glanced at Meris, then, shifting his burden to one arm, held out a welcoming hand. “I hadn’t expected an invasion,” he smiled. “To tell the truth, I didn’t know what to expect.” He thumped the package down on the table and grinned at Meris. “Chip’s sure now that writers are psychos,” he said. “Any normal person could wait till morning for paper or use flattened grocery bags!” He shrugged out of his jacket. “Now.”

Jemmy said, “It’s really quite simple. Since you wrote your book and have read it through several times, the thing exists as a whole in your memory, just as it was on paper. So all we have to do is put it on paper again.” He gestured.

“That’s all?” Mark’s hands went back through his hair.

“That’s all? Man, that’s all I had to do after my notes were organized, months ago! Maybe I should have settled for flattened grocery bags! Why, the sheer physical-” The light was draining out of his face.

“Wait-wait!” Jemmy’s hand closed warmly over his sagging shoulder. “Let me finish.”

“Davy, here, is our gadgeteer. He dreams up all kinds of knick-knacks and among other things, he has come forth with a word scriber. Even better”-he glanced at Johannan-“than the ones brought from the New Home. All you have to do is think and the scriber writes down your thoughts. Here-try it-” he said into Mark’s very evident skepticism.

Davy put a piece of paper on the table in front of Mark and, on it, a small gadget that looked vaguely like a small sanding block in that it was curved across the top and flat on the bottom. “Go on,” urged Davy, “think something. You don’t even have to vocalize. I’ve keyed it to you. Karen sorted your setting for me.”

Mark looked around at the interested, watching faces, at Meris’s eyes, blurred with hesitant hope, and then down at the scriber. The scriber stirred, then slid swiftly across the paper, snapping back to the beginning of a line again, as quick as thought. Davy picked up the paper and handed it to Mark. Meris crowded to peer over his shoulder.

Of all the dern-fool things! As if it were possible-Look at the son-a-gun go!

All neatly typed, neatly spaced, appropriately punctuated. Hope flamed up in Mark’s eyes. “Maybe so,” he said, turning to Jemmy. “What do I do, now?”

“Well,” said Jemmy. “You have your whole book in your mind, but a mass of other things, too. It’d be almost impossible for you to think through your book without any digressions or side thoughts, so Karen will blanket your mind for you except for your book-“

“Hypnotism-” Mark’s withdrawal was visible.

“No,” said Karen. “Just screening out interference. Think how much time was taken up in your original draft by distractions-“

Meris clenched her hands and gulped, remembering all the hours Mark had had to-to baby-sit her while she was still rocking her grief like a rag doll with all the stuffings pulled out. She felt an arm across her shoulders and turned to Valancy’s comforting smile. “All over,” said her eyes, kindly, “all past.”

“How about all the diagrams-” suggested Mark, “I can’t vocalize-“

“That’s where Remy comes in,” said Jemmy. “All you have to do is visualize each one. He’ll have his own scriber right here and he’ll take it from there.”

The cot was pulled up near the table and Mark disposed himself comfortably on it. The paper was unwrapped and stacked all ready. Remy and Davy arranged themselves strategically. Surrounded by briefly bowed heads, Jemmy said, “We are met together in Thy name.” Then Karen touched Mark gently on the forehead with one fingertip.

Mark suddenly lifted himself on one elbow. “Wait,” he said, “things are going too fast. Why-why are you doing this for us, anyway? We’re strangers. No concern of yours. Is it to pay us for taking care of Lala? In that case-“

Karen smiled. “Why did you take care of Lala? You could have turned her over to the authorities. A strange child, no relation, no concern of yours.”

“That’s a foolish question,” said Mark. “She needed help. She was cold and wet and lost. Anyone-“

“You did it for the same reason we are doing this for you,” said Karen; “Just because we had our roots on a different world doesn’t make us of different flesh. There are no strangers in God’s universe. You found an unhappy situation that you could do something about, so you did it. Without stopping to figure out the whys and wherefores. You did it just because that’s what love does.”

Mark lay back on the narrow pillow, “Thank you,” he said. Then he turned his face to Meris. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Her voice jerked a little past her emotion. “Love you, Mark!”

“Love you, Meris!”

Karen’s fingertip went to Mark’s forehead again. “I need contact,” she said a little apologetically, “especially with an Outsider.”

Meris fell asleep, propped up on the bunk, eyes lulled by the silent sli-i-i-ide, flip! sli-i-i-ide, flip! of the scriber, and the brisk flutter of finished pages from the tall pile of paper to the short one. She opened drowsy eyes to a murmur of voices and saw that the two piles of paper were almost balanced. She sat up to ease her neck where it had been bent against the cabin wall.

“But it’s wrong, I tell you!” Remy was waving the paper.

“Look, this line, here, where it goes-“

“Remy,” said Jemmy, “are you sure it’s wrong or is it just another earlier version of what we know now?”

“No!” said Remy. “This time it’s not that. This is a real mistake. He couldn’t possibly have meant it to be like that “

“Okay,” Jemmy nodded to Karen and she touched Mark’s forehead, He opened his eyes and half sat up. The scriber flipped across the paper and Karen stilled it with a touch.

“What is it?” he asked, “something go wrong?”

“No, it’s this diagram.” Remy brought it to him. “I think you have an error here. Look where this goes-“

The two bent over the paper. Meris looked around the cabin. Valancy was rocking a sleeping Lala in her arms. Davy was sound asleep in the upper bunk. At least his dangling leg looked very asleep. Johannan was absorbed in two books simultaneously. He seemed to be making a comparison of some sort. Meris lay back again, sliding down to a more comfortable position. For the first time in months and months the cabin was lapped from side to side with peace and relaxation. Even the animated discussion going on was no ruffling of the comfortable calmness. She heard, on the edge of her ebbing consciousness, “Why no! That’s not right at all!” Mark was astonished. “Hoo boy! If I’d sent that in with an error like that! Thanks, fella-” And sleep flowed over Meris.

She awoke later to the light chatter of Lala’s voice and opened drowsy eyes to see her trailing back from the bathroom, her feet tucked up under her gown away from the chilly floor as she drifted back to Valancy’s arms. The leg above Meris’s head swung violently and withdrew, to be replaced by Davy’s dangling head. He said something to Lala. She laughed and lifted herself up to his outstretched arms. There was a stirring around above Meris’s head before sleeping silence returned.

Valancy stood and stretched widely. She moved over to the table and thumbed the stack of paper.

“Going well,” she said softly.

“Yes,” said Jemmy, “I feel a little like a midwife, snatching something new-born in the middle of the night.”

“Dern shame to stop here, though,” said Remy. “With such a good beginning-oh, barring a few excursions down dead ends-if we could only tack on a few more chapters.”

“‘Uh-uh!” Jemmy stood and stretched, letting his arms fall around Valancy’s shoulders. “You know better than that-“

“Not even one little hint?”

“Not even,” Jemmy was firm.

Sleep flowed over Meris again until pushed back by Davy’s sliding over the edge of the upper bunk.

“Right in the stomach!” he moaned as he dropped to the floor. “Such a kicking kid I never met. How’d you survive?” he asked Valancy.

“Nary a kick,” she laughed. “Technique-that’s what it takes.”

“I was just wondering,” said Davy, opening the stove and probing the coals before he put in another chunk of oak.

“That kid Johannan was talking about-the one that’s got interested in vintage cars. What about that place up on Bearcat Flat? You know, that little box canyon where we put all our old jalopies when we discarded them. Engines practically unused. Lifting’s cheaper and faster. Of course the seats and the truck beds are kinda beat up, and the paint. Trees scratch the daylights out of paint. How many are there there? Let’s see. The first one was about 19-ought-something-“

Johannan looked up from his books. “He said something about selling parts or cars to get money for college-” “Or restoring them!” Davy cried. “Hey, that could be fun! If he’s the kind that would-“

“He is,” said Johannan and went back to his reading.

“It’s almost daylight.” Davy went to the window and parted the curtains. “Wonder how early a riser he is?”

Meris turned her back to the light and slid back under sleep again.

Noise and bustle filled the cabin.

Coffee was perking fragrantly, eggs cracking, bacon spitting itself to crispness. Remy was cheerfully mashing slices of bread down on the hot stove lid and prying up the resultant toast. Lala was flicking around the table, putting two forks at half the places and two knives at the others, then giggling her way back around with redistribution after Johannan pointed out her error.

Meris, reaching for a jar of peach marmalade on the top shelf of the cupboard, wondered how a day could feel so new and so wonderful. Mark sat at his desk opening and closing the box wherein lay the finished manuscript. He opened it again and fingered the top edge of the stack, He caught Jemmy’s sympathetic grin and grinned back.

“Just making sure it’s really there,” he explained. “Magic put it in there. Magic might take it out again.”

“Not this magic. I’ll even ride shotgun for you into town and see that it gets sent off okay,” said Jemmy.

“Magic or no,” said Mark, sobering, “once more I can say Thank God! Thank God it’s done!”

“Amen!” said a hovering Lala, and, laughing, Jemmy scooped her out of the air as they all found places at the table.

Tad was an early riser. He was standing under the hovering pickup, gaping upward in admiring astonishment.

“Oops!” said Davy, with a sidewise glance at Jemmy. Tad was swept up in a round of introductions during which the pickup lowered slowly to the ground.

Tad turned from the group back to the pickup. “Look at it!” he said. “It must be at least forty years old!” His voice pushed its genesis back beyond the pyramids.

“At least that,” said Davy. “Wanta see the motor?”

“Do I!” He stood by impatiently as Davy wrestled with the hood. Then he blinked. “Hey! How did it get way up there? I mean, how’d it get down-“

“Look,” said Davy hastily, “see this goes to the spark-“

The others, laughing, pried into Mark’s car and drove away from the two absorbed autophiles-in-embryo.

The car pulled over onto a pine flat halfway back from town and the triumphal mailing of the manuscript. This was the parting place. Davy would follow later with the pickup.

“It’s over,” said Meris, her shoulders sagging a little as she put Lala’s small bundle of belongings into Valancy’s hands.

“All over.” Her voice was desolate.

“Only this little episode,” comforted Valancy. “It’s really only begun.” She put Lala into Meris’s arms. “Tell her good-by, Lala.”

Lala hugged Meris stranglingly tight saying, “Love you, Meris!”

“Love you, Lala!” Meris’s voice was shaken with laughter and sorrow.

“It’s just that she filled up the empty places so wonderfully well,” she explained to Valancy.

“Yes,” said Valancy softly, her eyes tender and compassionate. “But, you know,” she went on. “You are pregnant again!”

Before Meris could produce an intelligible thought, good-bys were finished and the whole group was losing itself in the tangle of creek-side vegetation. Lala’s vigorous waving of Deeko was the last sign of them before the leaves closed behind them.

Meris and Mark stood there, Meris’s head pressed to Mark’s shoulder, both too drained for any emotion. Then Meris stirred and moved toward the car, her eyes suddenly shining. “I don’t think I can wait,” she said, “I don’t think-“

“Wait for what?” asked Mark, following her.

“To tell Dr. Hilf-” She covered her mouth, dismayed.

“Oh, Mark! We never did find out that doctor’s name!”

“Not that Hilf is drooling to know,” said Mark, starting the car, “but next time—”

“Oh, yes,” Meris sat back, her mouth curving happily, “next time, next time!”

The next time wasn’t so long by the calendar, but measured by the anticipation and the marking time, it seemed an endless eternity. Then one night Meris, looking down into the warm, moistly fragrant blanket-bundle in the crook of her elbow, felt time snap back into focus. It snapped back so completely and satisfyingly that the long, empty time of grief dwindled to a memory-ache tucked back in the fading past.

“And the next one,” she said drowsily to Mark, “will be a brother for her.”

The nurse laughed. “Most new mothers feel, at this point, that they are through with childbearing. But I guess they soon forget because we certainly get a lot of repeaters!”

The Saturday before the baby’s christening, Meris felt a stir of pleasure as she waited for her guests to arrive. So much of magic was interwoven with her encounters with them, the magic of being freed from grief, of bringing forth a new life, and the magic of the final successful production of Mark’s book. She was wondering, with a pleasurable apprehension, what means of transportation the guests would use, treetop high, one wheel spinning lazily! when a clanging clatter drew her to the front window.

There in all its glory, shining with love, new paint, and dignity, sailed the Overland that had been moldering behind Tad’s barn. Flushed with excitement and pride, Tad, with an equally proud Johannan seated beside him, steered the vehicle ponderously over to the curb. There it hiccoughed, jumped, and expired with a shudder.

In the split second of silence after the noise cut off, there was a clinking rattle and a nut fell down from somewhere underneath and rolled out into the street.

There was a shout of relieved and amused laughter and the car erupted people apparently through and over every door. Meris shrank back a little, still tender in her social contact area. Then calling, “Mark, they’re here,” she opened the door to the babble of happy voices.

All the voices turned out to be female-type voices and she looked around and asked, “But where-?”

“The others?” Karen asked. “Behold!” And she gestured toward the old car where the only signs of life were three sets of feet protruding from under it, with a patient Jemmy leaning on a brightly black fender above them. “May I present, the feet, Tad, Davy, and Johannan?” Karen laughed.

“Johannan is worse than either of the boys. You see, he’d never ever seen a car before he rode in yours!”

Finally everyone was met and greeted and all the faces swam up to familiarity again out of the remoteness of the time Before the Baby.

Lala-forever Lala in spite of translations!-peered at the bundle on Valancy’s lap. “It’s little,” she said.

Meris was startled. Valancy smiled at her. “Did you expect her to un-English forever?” she teased. “Yes, Lala, it’s a girl baby, very new and very little.”

“I’m not little,” said Lala, straightening from where she leaned against Meris and tightening to attention, her tummy rounding out in her effort to assume proportions. “I’m big!” She moved closer to Meris. “I had a birthday.”

“Oh, how nice!” said Meris.

“We don’t know what year to put on it, though,” said Lala solemnly. “I want to put six, but they want to put five.”

“Oh, six, of course!” exclaimed Meris.

Lala launched herself onto Meris and hugged her hair all askew. “Love you, Meris!” she cried. “Six, of course!”

“There has been a little discussion about the matter,” said Valancy. “The time element differs between here and the New Home. And since she is precocious-“

“The New Home,” said Meris thoughtfully. “The New Home. You know, I suspended all my disbelief right at the beginning of this Lala business, but now I feel questions bubbling and frothing-“

“I thought I saw question marks arising in both your eyes,” laughed Valancy. “After church tomorrow, after this cherub receives her name before God and the congregation, we’ll tackle a few of those questions. But now-” she hugged the wide-eyed, moist-mouthed child gently “-now this is the center of our interest.”

The warm Sunday afternoon was slipping into evening. Davy, Tad, and Johannan were-again-three pairs of feet protruding from under the Overland. The three had managed to nurse it along all the way to the University City, but now it stubbornly sat in the driveway and merely rocked, voiceless, no matter how long they cranked it.

The three of them had been having the time of their lives.

They had visited the Group’s auto boneyard up-canyon and then, through avid reading of everything relevant that they could put their hands on, had slowly and bedazzledly come to a realization of what a wealth of material they had to work with.

Tad, after a few severe jolts from working with members of The People, such as seeing cars and parts thereof clattering massively unsupported through the air and watching Johannan weld a rip in a fender by tracing it with a fingertip, then concentrating on the task, had managed to compartmentalize the whole car business and shut it off securely from any need to make the methods of The People square with Outsiders’ methods. And his college fund was budding beautifully.

So there the three of them were under the Overland that was the current enthusiasm, ostensibly to diagnose the trouble, but also to delight in breathing deeply of sun-warmed metal and to taste the oily fragrance of cup grease and dust.

Mark and Jemmy were perched on the patio wall, immersed in some point from Mark’s book. Lala was wrapped up in the wonder of Alicia’s tiny, flailing fist, that if intercepted, would curl so tightly around a finger or thumb.

Meris smiled at Valancy and shifted the burden of ‘Licia to her other arm. “I think I’d better park this bundle some where. She’s gained ten pounds in the last five minutes so I think that a nap is indicated.” With the help of Valancy, Karen, and Bethie, Meris gathered up various odds and ends of equipment and carried the already sleeping ‘Licia into the house.

Later, in the patio, the women gathered again, Lala a warm weight in Valancy’s lap.

“Now,” said Meris, comfortably. “Now’s the time to erase a few of my question marks. What is the Home? Where is the Home? Why is the New Home?”

“Not so fast-not so fast!” laughed Valancy. “This is Bethie’s little red wagon. Let her drag it!”

“Oh, but-I” Bethie blushed and shook her head. “Why mine? I’d rather-“

“But you have been wanting to Assemble for Shadow, anyway, so that she’d have a verbalized memory of the Crossing. It’s closer through your line.” Her smile softened as she turned to Meris. “My parents were in the Crossing, but they were Called during the landing. Bethie’s mother was in the Crossing and survived. Karen’s grandparents did, too, but that’s a step farther back. And, Bethie, haven’t you already-“

“Yes,” said Bethie softly, “from the Home to the beginning of the Crossing. Oh, how strange! How strange and wonderful! Oh, Valancy! To have lost the Home!”

“Now you’re question-marking my eyes,” laughed Valancy.

“I’ve never gone by chapter and verse through that life myself. Jemmy-Mark-we’re ready!”

“It’ll be better, subvocal,” said Bethie shyly. “Karen, you could touch Meris’s hand so she can see, too. And Jemmy, you and Mark.” The group settled comfortably.

“I went back through my mother’s remembrances,” Bethie’s soft voice came through a comfortable dimming and fading of the patio. “Her grandmother before her verbalized a great deal. It was a big help. We can take it from her. We will begin on one happy morning-“

DELUGE

… and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

GEN. 7:17

“The children are up already, Eva-lee?” asked David, lounging back in his chair after his first long, satisfying swallow from his morning cup.

“Foolish question, David, on Gathering Day,” I laughed.

“They’ve been up since before it was light. Have you forgotten how you used to feel?”

“Of course not.” My son cradled his cup in his two hands to warm it and watched idly until steam plumed up fragrantly. “I just forgot-oh, momentarily, I assure you-that it was Gathering Day. So far it hasn’t felt much like failova weather.”

“No, it hasn’t, I answered, puckering my forehead thoughtfully. “It has felt-odd-this year. The green isn’t as-Oh, good morning, ‘Chell,” to my daughter-of-love, “I suppose the little imps waked you first thing?”

“At least half an hour before that,” yawned ‘Chell. “I suppose I used to do it myself. But just wait-they’ll have their yawning time when they’re parents.”

“Mother! Mother! Father! Gramma!”

The door slapped open and the children avalanched in, all talking shrilly at once until David waved his cup at them and lifted one eyebrow. ‘Chell laughed at the sudden silence.

“That’s better,” she said. “What’s all the uproar?”

The children looked at one another and the five-year-old Eve was nudged to the fore, but, as usual, David started talking. “We were out gathering panthus leaves to make our Gathering baskets, and all at once-” He paused and nudged Eve again. “You tell, Eve. After all, it’s you-“

“Oh, no!” cried ‘Chell, “not my last baby! Not already!”

“Look,” said Eve solemnly. “Look at me.”

She stood tiptoe and wavered a little, her arms out stretched for balance, and then she lifted slowly and carefully up into her mother’s arms.

We all laughed and applauded and even ‘Chell, after blotting her surprised tears on Eve’s dark curls, laughed with us.

“Bless-a-baby!” she said, hugging her tight. “Lifting all alone already-and on Gathering Day, too! It’s not everyone who can have Gathering Day for her Happy Day!” Then she sobered and pressed the solemn ceremonial kiss on each cheek. “Lift in delight all your life, Eve!” she said.

Eve matched her parents’ solemnity as her father softly completed the ritual. “By the Presence and the Name and the Power, lift to good and the Glory until your Calling.” And we all joined in making the Sign.

“I speak for her next,” I said, holding out my arms. “Think you can lift to Gramma, Eve?”

“Well …” Eve considered the gap between her and me-the chair, the breakfast table-all the obstacles before my waiting arms. And then she smiled. “Look at me,” she said. “Here I come, Gramma.”

She lifted carefully above the table, overarching so high that the crisp girl-frill around the waist of her close-fitting briefs brushed the ceiling. Then she was safe in my arms.

“That’s better than I did,” called Simon through the laughter that followed. “I landed right in the flahmen jam!”

“So you did, son,” laughed David, ruffling Simon’s coppery-red hair. “A full dish of it.”

“Now that that’s taken care of, let’s get organized. Are you all Gathering together?”

“No.” Lytha, our teener, flushed faintly. “I-we-our party will be mostly-well-” She paused and checked her blush, shaking her dark hair back from her face. “Timmy and I are going with Beckie and Andy. We’re going to the Mountain.”

“Well!” David’s brow lifted in mock consternation. “Mother, did you know our daughter was two-ing?”

“Not really, Father!” cried Lytha hastily, unable to resist the bait though she knew he was teasing. “Four-ing, it is, really.”

“Adonday veeah!” he sighed in gigantic relief. “Only half the worry it might be!” He smiled at her. “Enjoy,” he said, “but it ages me so much so fast that a daughter of mine is two-oh, pardon, four-ing already.”

“The rest of us are going together,” said Davie. “We’re going to the Tangle-meadows. The failova were thick there last year. Bet we three get more than Lytha and her two-Jug foursome! They’ll be looking mostly for flahmen anyway!” with the enormous scorn of the almost-teen for the activities of the teens.

“Could be,” said David. “But after all, your sole purpose this Gathering Day is merely to Gather.”

“I notice you don’t turn up your nose at the flahmen after they’re made into jam,” said Lytha. “And you just wait, smarty, until the time comes-and it will,” her cheeks pinked up a little, “when you find yourself wanting to share a flahmen with some gaggly giggle of a girl!”

“Flahman!” muttered Davie. “Girls!’”

“They’re both mighty sweet, Son,” laughed David. “You wait and see.”

Ten minutes later, ‘Chell and David and I stood at the window watching the children leave. Lytha, after nervously putting on and taking off, arranging and rearranging her Gathering Day garlands at least a dozen times, was swept up by a giggling group that zoomed in a trio and went out a quartet and disappeared in long, low lifts across the pasture-land toward the heavily wooded Mountain.

Davie tried to gather Eve up as in the past, but she stubbornly refused to be trailed, and kept insisting, “I can lift now! Let me do it. I’m big!”

Davie rolled exasperated eyes and then grinned and the three started off for Tangle-meadows in short hopping little lifts, with Eve always just beginning to lift as they landed or just landing as they lifted, her small Gathering basket bobbing along with her. Before they disappeared, however, she was trailing from Davie’s free hand and the lifts were smoothing out long and longer. My thoughts went with them as I remembered the years I had Gathered the lovely luminous flowers that popped into existence in a single night, leafless, almost stemless, as though formed like dew, or falling like concentrated moonlight. No one knows now how the custom of loves sharing a flahmen came into being, but it’s firmly entrenched in the traditions of the People. To share that luminous loveliness, petal by petal, one for me and one for you and all for us-

“How pleasant that Gathering Day brings back our loves,” I sighed dreamily as I stood in the kitchen and snapped my fingers for the breakfast dishes to come to me. “People that might otherwise be completely forgotten come back so vividly every year-“

“Yes,” said ‘Chell, watching the tablecloth swish out the window, huddling the crumbs together to dump them in the feather-pen in back of the house. “And it’s a good anniversary-marker. Most of us meet our loves at the Gathering Festival-or discover them there.” She took the returning cloth and folded it away. “I never dreamed when I used to fuss with David over mud pies and playhouses that one Gathering Day he’d blossom into my love.”

“Me blossom?” David peered around the doorjamb. “Have you forgotten how you looked, preblossom? Knobby knees, straggly hair, toothless grin-!”

“David, put me down!” ‘Chell struggled as she felt herself being lifted to press against the ceiling. “We’re too old for such nonsense!”

“Get yourself down, then, Old One,” he said from the other room. “If I’m too old for nonsense, I’m too old to ‘platt’ you.”

“Never mind, funny fellow,” she said, “I’ll do it myself.” Her down-reaching hand strained toward the window and she managed to gather a handful of the early morning sun. Quickly she platted herself to the floor and tiptoed off into the other room, eyes aglint with mischief, finger hushing to her lips.

I smiled as I heard David’s outcry and ‘Chell’s delighted laugh, but I felt my smile slant down into sadness. I leaned my arms on the windowsill and looked lovingly at all the dear familiarity around me. Before Thann’s Calling, we had known so many happy hours in the meadows and skies and waters of this loved part of the Home.

“And he is still here,” I thought comfortably. “The grass still bends to his feet, the leaves still part to his passing, the waters still ripple to his touch, and my heart still cradles his name.

“Oh, Thann, Thann!” I wouldn’t let tears form in my eyes. I smiled. “I wonder what kind of a grampa you’d have made!” I leaned my forehead on my folded arms briefly, then turned to busy myself with straightening the rooms for the day. I was somewhat diverted from routine by finding six mismated sandals stacked, for some unfathomable reason, above the middle of Simon’s bed, the top one, inches above the rest, bobbing in the breeze from the open window.

The oddness we had felt about the day turned out to be more than a passing uneasiness and we adults were hardly surprised when the children came straggling back hours before they usually did.

We hailed them from afar, lifting out to them expecting to help with their burdens of brightness, but the children didn’t answer our hails. They plodded on toward the house, dragging slow feet in the abundant grass.

“What do you suppose has happened?” breathed ‘Chell.

“Surely not Eve-“

“Adonday veeah!” murmured David, his eyes intent on the children. “Something’s wrong, but I see Eve.”

“Hi, young ones,” he called cheerfully. “How’s the crop this year?”

The children stopped, huddled together, almost fearfully.

“Look.” Davie pushed his basket at them. Four misshapen failova glowed dully in the basket. No flickering, glittering brightness. No flushing and paling of petals. No crisp, edible sweetness of blossom. Only a dull glow, a sullen winking, an unappetizing crumbling.

“That’s all,” said Davie, his voice choking. “That’s all we could find!” He was scared and outraged-outraged that his world dared to be different from what he had expected-had counted on.

Eve cried, “No, no! I have one. Look!” Her single flower was a hard-clenched flahmen bud with only a smudge of light at the tip.

“No failova?” ‘Chell took Davie’s proffered basket. “No flahmen? But they always bloom on Gathering Day. Maybe the buds-“

“No buds,” said Simon, his face painfully white under the brightness of his hair. I glanced at him quickly. He seldom ever got upset over anything. What was there about this puzzling development that was stirring him?

“David!” ‘Chell’s face turned worriedly to him. “What’s wrong? There have always been failova!”

“I know,” said David, fingering Eve’s bud and watching it crumble in his lingers. “Maybe it’s only in the meadows. Maybe there’s plenty in the hills.”

“No,” I said. “Look.”

Far off toward the bills we could see the teeners coming, slowly, clustered together, panthus baskets trailing.

“No failova,” said Lytha as they neared us. She turned her basket up, her face troubled. “No failova and no flahmen. Not a flicker on all the hills where they were so thick last year. Oh, Father, why not? It’s as if the sun hadn’t come up! Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing catastrophic, Lytha.” David comforted her with a smile. “We’ll bring up the matter at the next meeting of the Old Ones. Someone will have the answer. It is unusual, you know.” (Unheard of, he should have said.) “We’ll find out then.” He boosted Eve to his shoulder. “Come oh, young ones, the world hasn’t ended. It’s still Gathering Day! I’ll race you to the house. First one there gets six koomatka to eat all by himself! One, two, three-“

Off shot the shrieking, shouting children, Eve’s little heels pummeling David’s chest in her excitement. The teeners followed for a short way and then slanted off on some project of their own, waving good-by to ‘Chell and me. We women followed slowly to the house, neither speaking.

I wasn’t surprised to find Simon waiting for me in my room. He sat huddled on my bed, his hands clasping and unclasping and trembling, a fine, quick trembling deeper than muscles and tendons. His face was so white it was almost luminous and the skiff of golden freckles across the bridge of his nose looked metallic.

“Simon?” I touched him briefly on his hair that was so like Thann’s had been.

“Gramma.” His breath caught in a half hiccough. He cleared his throat carefully as though any sudden movement would break something fragile. “Gramma,” he whispered. “I can See!”

“See!” I sat down beside him because my knees suddenly evaporated. “Oh, Simon! You don’t mean-“

“Yes, I do, Gramma.” He rubbed his hands across his eyes. “We had just found the first failova and wondering what was wrong with it when everything kinda went away and I was-somewhere-Seeing!” He looked up, terrified.

“It’s my Gift!”

I gathered the suddenly wildly sobbing child into my arms and held him tightly until his terror spent itself and I felt his withdrawal. I let him go and watched his wet, flushed face dry and peal back to normal.

“Oh, Gramma,” he said, “I don’t want a Gift yet. I’m only ten. David hasn’t found his Gift and he’s twelve already. I don’t want a Gift-especially this one ” He closed his eyes and shuddered. “Oh, Gramma, what I’ve seen already! Even the Happy scares me because it’s still in the Presence!”

“It’s not given to many,” I said, at a loss how to comfort him. “Why, Simon, it would take a long journey back to our Befores to find one in our family who was permitted to See. It is an honor-to be able to put aside the curtain of time-“

“I don’t want to!” Simon’s eyes brimmed again. “I don’t think it’s a bit of fun. Do I have to?”

“Do you have to breathe?” I asked him. “You could stop if you wanted to, but your body would die. You can refuse your Gift, but part of you would die-the part of you the Power honors-your place in the Presence-your syllable of the Name.” All this he knew from first consciousness, but I could feel him taking comfort from my words. “Do you realize the People have had no one to See for them since-since-why, clear back to the Peace! And now you are it! Oh, Simon, I am so proud of you!” I laughed at my own upsurge of emotion. “Oh, Simon! May I touch my thrice-honored grandson?”

With a wordless cry, he flung himself into my arms and we clung tightly, tightly, before his deep renouncing withdrawal He looked at me then and slowly dropped his arms from around my neck, separation in every movement. I could see growing in the topaz tawniness of his eyes, his new set-apartness. It made me realize anew how close the Presence is to us always and how much nearer Simon was than any of us. Also, naked and trembling in my heart was the recollection that never did the People have one to See for them unless there lay ahead portentous things to See.

Both of us shuttered our eyes and looked away, Simon to veil the eyes that so nearly looked on the Presence, I, lest I be blinded by the Glory reflected in his face.

“Which reminds me,” I said in a resolutely everyday voice, “I will now listen to explanations as to why those six sandals were left on, over, and among your bed this morning.”

“Well,” he said with a tremulous grin. “The red ones are too short-” He turned stricken, realizing eyes to me. “I won’t ever be able to tell anyone anything any more unless the Power wills it!” he cried. Then he grinned again, “And the green ones need the latchets renewed-“

A week later the usual meeting was called and David and I-we were among the Old Ones of our Group-slid into our robes. I felt a pang as I smoothed the shimmering fabric over my hips, pressing pleats in with my thumb and finger to adjust for lost weight. The last time I had worn it was the Festival the year Thann was Called. Since then I hadn’t wanted to attend the routine Group meetings-not without Thann. I hadn’t realized that I was losing weight.

‘Chell clung to David. “I wish now that I were an Old One, too,” she said. “I’ve got a nameless worry in the pit of my stomach heavy enough to anchor me for life. Hurry home, you two!”

I looked back as we lifted just before the turnoff. I smiled to see the warm lights begin to well up in the windows. Then my smile died. I felt, too, across my heart the shadow that made ‘Chell feel it was Lighting Time before the stars had broken through the last of the day.

The blow-when it came-was almost physical, so much so that I pressed my hands to my chest, my breath coming hard, trying too late to brace against the shock. David’s sustaining hand was on my arm but I felt the tremor in it, too. Around me I felt my incredulity and disbelief shared by the other Old Ones of the Group.

The Oldest spread his hands as he was deluged by a flood of half-formed questions. “It has been Seen. Already our Home has been altered so far that the failova and flahmen can’t come to blossom. As we accepted the fact that there were no failova and flahmen this year, so we must accept the fact that there will be no more Home for us.”

In the silence that quivered after his words, I could feel the further stricken sag of heartbeats around me and suddenly my own heart slowed until I wondered if the Power was stilling it now-now-in the midst of this confused fear and bewilderment.

“Then we are all Called?” I couldn’t recognize the choked voice that put the question. “How long before the Power summons us?”

“We are not Called,” said the Oldest. “Only the Home is Called. We-go.”

“Go!” The thought careened from one to another.

“Yes,” said the Oldest. “Away from the Home. Out.”

Life apart from the Home? I slumped. It was too much to be taken in all at once. Then I remembered. Simon! Oh, poor Simon! If he were Seeing clearly already-but of course he was. He was the one who had told the Oldest! No wonder he was terrified! Simon, I said to the Oldest subvocally. Yes, answered the Oldest. Do not communicate to the others. He scarcely can bear the burden now. To have it known would multiply it past his bearing. Keep his secret-completely.

I came back to the awkward whirlpool of thoughts around me.

“But,” stammered someone, speaking what everyone was thinking, “can the People live away from the Home?

Wouldn’t we die like uprooted plants?”

“We can live,” said the Oldest. “This we know, as we know that the Home can no longer be our biding place.”

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” It was Neil-Timmy’s father.

“We don’t know.” The Oldest was shamed. “We have forgotten too much since the Peace to be able to state the mechanics of what is happening, but one of us Sees us go and the Home destroyed, so soon that we have no time to go back to the reasons.”

Since we were all joined in our conference mind which is partially subvocal, all our protests and arguments and cries were quickly emitted and resolved, leaving us awkwardly trying to plan something of which we had no knowledge of our own.

“If we are to go,” I said, feeling a small spurt of excitement inside my shock, “we’ll have to make again. Make a tool. No, that’s not the word. We have tools still. Man does with tools. No, it’s a-a machine we’ll have to make. Machines do to man. We haven’t been possessed by machines-“

“For generations,” said David. “Not since-” He paused to let our family’s stream of history pour through his mind.

“Since Eva-lee’s thrice great-grandfather’s time.”

“Nevertheless,” said the Oldest, “we must make ships.” His tongue was hesitant on the long unused word. “I have been in communication with the other Oldest Ones around the Home. Our Group must make six of them.”

“How can we?” asked Nell; “We have no plans. We don’t know such things any more. We have forgotten almost all of it. But I do know that to break free from the Home would take a pushing something that all of us together couldn’t supply.”

“We will have the-the fuel,” said the Oldest. “When the time comes. My Befores knew the fuel. We would not need it if only our motivers had developed their Gift fully, but as they did not-

“We must each of us search the Before stream of our lives and find the details that we require in this hour of need. By the Presence, the Name, and the Power, let us remember.”

The evening sped away almost in silence as each mind opened and became receptive to the flow of racial memory that lay within. All of us partook in a general way of that stream that stemmed almost from the dawn of the Home. In particular, each family had some specialized area of the memory in greater degree than the others. From time to time came a sigh or a cry prefacing, “My Befores knew of the metals,” or “Mine of the instruments”-the words were unfamiliar “The instruments of pressure and temperature.”

“Mine” I discovered with a glow-and a sigh-“the final putting together of the shells of ships.”

“Yes,” nodded David, “and also, from my father’s Befores, the settings of the-the-the settings that guide the ship.”

“Navigation,” said Neil’s deep voice. “My Befores knew of the making of the navigation machine yours knew how to set.”

“And all,” I said, “all of this going back to nursery school would have been unnecessary if we hadn’t rested so comfortably so long on the achievements of our Befores!” I felt the indignant withdrawal of some of those about me, but the acquiescence of most of them.

When the evening ended, each of us Old Ones carried not only the burden of the doom of the Home but a part of the past that, in the Quiet Place of each home, must, with the help of the Power, be probed and probed again, until-

“Until-” The Oldest stood suddenly, clutching the table as though he just realized the enormity of what he was saying.

“Until we have the means of leaving the Home-before it becomes a band of dust between the stars-“

Simon and Lytha were waiting up with ‘Chell when David and I returned. At the sight of our faces, Simon slipped into the bedroom and woke Davie and the two crept quietly back into the room. Simon’s thought reached out ahead of him. Did he tell? And mine went out reassuringly. No. And he won’t.

In spite of-or perhaps because of-the excitement that had been building up in me all evening, I felt suddenly drained and weak. I sat down, gropingly, in a chair and pressed nay hands to my face; “You tell them, David,” I said, fighting an odd vertigo.

David shivered and swallowed hard. “There were no failova because the Home is being broken up. By next Gathering Day there will be no Home. It is being destroyed. We can’t even say why. We have forgotten too much and there isn’t time to seek out the information now, but long before next Gathering Day, we will be gone-out.”

‘Chell’s breath caught audibly. “‘No Home!” she said, her eyes widening and darkening. “No Home? Oh, David, don’t joke. Don’t try to scare-“

“It’s true.” My voice had steadied now. “It has been Seen. We must build ships and seek asylum among the stars.” My heart gave a perverse jump of excitement. “The Home will no longer exist. We will be homeless exiles.”

“But the People away from the Home!” ‘Chell’s face puckered, close to tears. “‘How can we live anywhere else? We are a part of the Home as much as the Home is a part of us. We can’t just amputate-“

“Father!” Lytha’s voice was a little too loud. She said again, “Father, are all of us going together in the same ship?”

“No,” said David. “Each Group by itself.” Lytha relaxed visibly. “Our Group is to have six ships,” he added.

Lytha’s hands tightened. “Who is to go in which ship?”

“It hasn’t been decided yet,” said David, provoked. “How can you worry about a detail like that when the Home, the Home will soon be gone!”

“It’s important,” said Lytha, flushing. “Timmy and I-“

“Oh,” said David. “I’m sorry, Lytha. I didn’t know. The matter will have to be decided when the time comes.”

It didn’t take long for the resiliency of childhood to overcome the shock of the knowledge born on Gathering Day. Young laughter rang as brightly through the hills and meadows as always. But David and ‘Chell clung closer to one another, sharing the heavy burden of leave-taking, as did all the adults of the Home. At times I, too, felt wildly, hopefully, that this was all a bad dream to be awakened from. But other times I had the feeling that this was an awakening. This was the dawn after a long twilight-a long twilight of slanting sun and relaxing shadows. Other times I felt so detached from the whole situation that wonder welled up in me to see the sudden tears, the sudden clutching of familiar things, that had become a sort of pattern among us as realization came and went. And then, there were frightening times when I felt weakness flowing into me like a river-a river that washed all the Home away on a voiceless wave. I was almost becoming more engrossed in the puzzle of me than in the puzzle of the dying Home-and I didn’t like it,

David and I went often to Meeting, working with the rest of the Group on the preliminary plans for the ships. One night he leaned across the table to the Oldest and asked, “How do we know how much food will be needed to sustain us until we find asylum?”

The Oldest looked steadily back at him. “We don’t know,” he said. “We don’t know that we will ever find asylum.”

“Don’t know?” David’s eyes were blank with astonishment.

“No,” said the Oldest. “We found no other habitable worlds before the Peace. We have no idea how far we will have to go or if we shall any of us live to see another Home. Each Group is to be assigned to a different sector of the sky. On Crossing Day, we say good-by-possibly forever-to all the other Groups. It may be that only one ship will plant the seeds of the People upon a new world. It may be that we will all he Called before a new Home is found.”

“Then,” said David, “why don’t we stay here and take our Calling with the Home?”

“Because the Power has said to go. We are given time to go back to the machines. The Power is swinging the gateway to the stars open to us. We must take the gift and do what we can with it. We have no right to deprive our children of any of the years they might have left to them.”

After David relayed the message to ‘Chell, she clenched both her fists tight up against her anguished heart and cried, “We can’t! Oh, David! We can’t! We can’t leave the Home for-for-nowhere! Oh, David!” And she clung to him, wetting his shoulder with her tears.

“We can do what we must do,” he said. “All of the People are sharing this sorrow so none of us must make the burden any heavier for the others. The children learn their courage from us, ‘Chell. Be a good teacher.” He rocked her close-pressed head, his hand patting her tumbled hair, his troubled eyes seeking mine.

“Mother-” David began-Eva-lee was for every day.

“Mother, it seems to me that the Presence is pushing us out of the Home deliberately and crumpling it like an empty eggshell so we can’t creep back into it. We have sprouted too few feathers on our wings since the Peace. I think we’re being pushed off the branch to make us fly. This egg has been too comfortable.” He laughed a little as he held ‘Chell away from him and dried her cheeks with the palms of his hands.

“I’m afraid I’ve made quite an omelet of my egg analogy, but can you think of anything really new that we have learned about Creation in our time.”

“Well,” I said, searching my mind, pleased immeasurably to hear my own thoughts on the lips of my son. “No, I can honestly say I can’t think of one new thing.”

“So if you were Called to the Presence right now and were asked, ‘What do you know of My Creation?’ all you could say would be ‘I know all that my Befores knew-my immediate Befores, that is-I mean, my father’” David opened his hands and poured out emptiness. “Oh, Mother! What we have forgotten! And how content we have been with so little!”

“But some other way.” ‘Chell cried. “This is so-so drastic and cruel!”

“All baby birds shiver,” said David, clasping her cold hands. “Sprout a pin feather, ‘Chell!”

And then the planning arrived at the point where work could begin. The sandal shops were empty. The doors were closed in the fabric centers and the ceramic workrooms. The sunlight crept unshadowed again and again across the other workshops and weeds began tentative invasions of the garden plots.

Far out in the surrounding hills, those of the People who knew how hovered in the sky, rolling back slowly the heavy green cover of the mountainsides, to lay bare the metal-rich underearth. Then the Old Ones, making solemn mass visits from Group to Group, quietly concentrated above the bared hills and drew forth from the very bones of the Home, the bright, bubbling streams of metal, drew them forth until they flowed liquidly down the slopes to the workplaces-the launching sites. And the rush and the clamor and the noise of the hurried multitudes broke the silence of the hills of the Home and sent tremors through all our windows-and through our shaken souls.

I often stood at the windows of our home, watching the sky-pointing monsters of metal slowly coming to form. From afar they had a severe sort of beauty that eased my heart of the hurt their having-to-be caused. But it was exciting! Oh, it was beautifully exciting! Sometimes I wondered what we thought about and what we did before we started all this surge out into space. On the days that I put in my helping hours on the lifting into place of the strange different parts that had been fashioned by other Old Ones from memories of the Befores, the upsurge of power and the feeling of being one part of such a gigantic undertaking, made me realize that we had forgotten without even being conscious of it, the warmth and strength of working together. Oh, the People are together even more than the leaves on a tree or the scales on a dolfeo, but working together? I knew this was my first experience with its pleasant strength. My lungs seemed to breathe deeper. My reach was longer, my grasp stronger. Odd, unfinished feelings welled up inside me and I wanted to do. Perhaps this was the itching of my new pin feathers. And then, sometimes when I reached an exultation that almost lifted me off my feet, would come the weakness, the sagging, the sudden desire for tears and withdrawal. I worried, a little, that there might come a time when I wouldn’t be able to conceal it.

The Crossing had become a new, engrossing game for the children. At night, shivering in the unseasonable weather, cool, but not cold enough to shield, they would sit looking up at the glory-frosted sky and pick out the star they wanted for a new Home, though they knew that none they could see would actually be it. Eve always chose the brightest pulsating one in the heavens and claimed it as hers. Davie chose one that burned steadily but faintly straight up above them. But when Lytha was asked, she turned the question aside and I knew that any star with Timmy would be Home to Lytha.

Simon usually sat by himself, a little withdrawn from the rest, his eyes quiet on the brightness overhead.

“What star is yours, Simon?” l asked one evening, feeling intrusive but knowing the guard he had for any words he should not speak.

“None,” he said, his voice heavy with maturity. “No star for me.”

“You mean you’ll wait and see?” I asked.

“No,” said Simon. “There won’t be one for me.”

My heart sank. “Simon, you haven’t been Called, have you?”

“No,” said Simon. “Not yet. I will see a new Home, but I will be Called from its sky.”

“Oh, Simon,” I cried softly, trying to find a comfort for him. “How wonderful to be able to See a new Home!”

“Not much else left to See,” said Simon. “Not that has words.” And I saw a flare of Otherside touch his eyes. “But Gramma, you should see the Home when the last moment comes! That’s one of the things I have no words for.”

“But we will have a new Home, then,” I said, going dizzily back to a subject I hoped I could comprehend. “You said-“

“I can’t See beyond my Calling,” said Simon. “I will see a new Home. I will be Called from its strange sky. I can’t See what is for the People there. Maybe they’ll all be Called with me. For me there’s flame and brightness and pain-then the Presence. That’s all I know.

“But, Gramma”-his voice had returned to that of a normal ten-year-old-“Lytha’s feeling awful bad. Help her.”

The children were laughing and frolicking in the thin blanket of snow that whitened the hills and meadows, their clear, untroubled laughter echoing through the windows to me and ‘Chell, who, with close-pressed lips, were opening the winter chests that had been closed so short a time ago. ‘Chell fingered the bead stitching on the toes of one little ankle-high boot.

“What will we need in the new Home, Eva-lee?” she asked despairingly.

“We have no way of knowing,” I said. “We have no idea of what kind of Home we’ll find.” If any, if any, if any, our unspoken thoughts throbbed together.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said ‘Chell. “What will it be like? Will we be able to live as we do now or will we have to go back to machines and the kind of times that went with our machines? Will we still be one People or be separated mind and soul?” Her hands clenched on a bright sweater and a tear slid down her cheek. “Oh, Eva-lee, maybe we won’t even be able to feel the Presence there!”

“You know better than that!” I chided. “The Presence is with us always, even if we have to go to the ends of the Universe. Since we can’t know now what the new Home will be like, let’s not waste our tears on it.” I shook out a gaily patterned quilted skirt. “Who knows,” I laughed, “maybe it will be a water world and we’ll become fish. Or a fire world and we the flames!”

“We can’t adjust quite that much!” protested ‘Chell, smiling moistly as she dried her face on the sweater. “But it is a comfort to know we can change some to match our environment.”

I reached for another skirt and paused, hand outstretched.

” ‘Chell,” I said, taken by a sudden idea, “what if the new Home is already inhabited? What if life is already there?”

“Why then, so much the better,” said ‘Chell. “Friends, help, places to live-“

“They might not accept us,” I said.

“But refugees-homeless!” protested ‘Chell. “If any in need came to the Home-“

“Even if they were different?”

“In the Presence, all are the same,” said ‘Chell.

“But remember,” my knuckles whitened on the skirt. “Only remember far enough back and you will find the Days of Difference before the Peace.”

And ‘Chell remembered. She turned her stricken face to me. “You mean there might be no welcome for us if we do find a new Home?”

“If we could treat our own that way, how might others treat strangers?” I asked, shaking out the scarlet skirt. “But, please the Power, it will not be so. We can only pray.”

It turned out that we had little need to worry about what kind of clothing or anything else to take with us. We would have to go practically possessionless-there was room for only the irreducible minimum of personal effects. There was considerable of an uproar and many loud lamentations when Eve found out that she could not take all of her play-People with her, and, when confronted by the necessity of making a choice-one, single one of her play-People, she threw them all in a tumbled heap in the corner of her room, shrieking that she would take none at all. A sharp smack of David’s hand on her bare thighs for her tantrum, and a couple of enveloping hugs for her comfort, and she sniffed up her tears and straightened out her play-People into a staggering, tumbling row across the floor. It took her three days to make her final selection. She chose the one she had named the Listener.

“She’s not a him and he’s not a her,” she had explained.

“This play-People is to listen.”

“To what?” teased Davie.

“To anything I have to tell and can’t tell anyone,” said Eve with great dignity. “You don’t even have to verb’lize to Listener. All you have to do is to touch and Listener knows what you feel and it tells you why it doesn’t feel good and the bad goes away.”

“Well, ask the Listener how to make the bad grammar go away,” laughed Davie. “You’ve got your sentences all mixed lip.”

“Listener knows what I mean and so do you!” retorted Eve.

So when Eve made her choice and stood hugging Listener and looking with big solemn eyes at the rest of her play-People, Davie suggested casually, “Why don’t you go bury the rest of them? They’re the same as Called now and we don’t leave cast-asides around.”

And from then until the last day, Eve was happy burying and digging up her play-People, always finding better, more advantageous, or prettier places to make her miniature casting-place.

Lytha sought me out one evening as I leaned over the stone wall around the feather-pen, listening to the go-to-bed contented cluckings and cooings. She leaned with me on the rough gray stones and, snapping an iridescent feather to her hand, smoothed her fingers back and forth along it wordlessly. We both listened idly to Eve and Davie. We could hear them talking together somewhere in the depths of the koomatka bushes beyond the feather-pen.

“What’s going to happen to the Home after we’re gone?” asked Eve idly.

“Oh, it’s going to shake and crack wide open and fire and lava will come out and everything will fall apart and burn up,” said Davie, no more emotionally than Eve.

“Ooo!” said Eve, caught in the imagination. “Then what will happen to my play-People? Won’t they be all right under here? No one can see them.”

“Oh, they’ll be set on fire and go up in a blaze of glory,” said Davie.

“A blaze of glory!” Eve drew a long happy sigh. “In a blaze of glory! Inna blaza glory! Oh, Davie! I’d like to see it. Can I, Davie? Can I?”

“Silly toola!” said Davie. “If you were here to see it, you’d go up in a blaze of glory, too!” And he lifted up from the koomatka bushes, the time for his chores with the animals hot on his heels.

“Inna blaza glory! Inna blaza glory!” sang Eve happily.

“All the play-People inna blaza glory! Her voice faded to a tuneless hum as she left, too.

“Gramma,” said Lytha, “is it really true?”

“Is what really true?” I asked.

“That the Home won’t he any more and that we will be gone.”

“Why yes, Lytha, why do you doubt it?”

“Because-because-” She gestured with the feather at the wall. “Look, it’s all so solid-the stones set each to the other so solidly-so-so always-looking. How can it all come apart?”

“You know from your first consciousness that nothing This-side is forever,” I said. “Nothing at all except Love. And even that gets so tangled up in the things of This-side that when your love is Called-” The memory of Thann was a heavy burning inside me-“Oh, Lytha! To look into the face of your love and know that Something has come apart and that never again This-side will you find him whole!”

And then I knew I had said the wrong thing. I saw Lytha’s too young eyes looking in dilated horror at the sight of her love-her not-quite-yet love, being pulled apart by this same whatever that was pulling the Home apart. I turned the subject.

“I want to go to the Lake for a good-by,” I said. “Would you like to go with me?”

“No, thank you, Granma.” Hers was a docile, little girl voice-oh surely much too young to be troubled about loves as yet! “We teeners are going to watch the new metal-melting across the hills. It’s fascinating. I’d like to be able to do things like that.”

“You can-you could have-” I said, “-if we had trained our youth as we should have.”

“Maybe I’ll learn,” said Lytha, her eyes intent on the feather. She sighed deeply and dissolved the feather into a faint puff of blue smoke. “Maybe I’ll learn.” And I knew her mind was not on metal-melting.

She turned away and then back again. “Gramma, The Love-” She stopped. I could feel her groping for words.

“The Love is forever, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Love This-side is part of The Love, isn’t it?”

“A candle lighted from the sun,” I said.

“But the candle will go out!” she cried. “Oh, Gramma! The candle will go out in the winds of the Crossing!” She turned her face from me and whispered, “Especially if it never quite got lighted.”

“There are other candles,” I murmured, knowing how like a lie it must sound to her.

“But never the same!” She snatched herself away from my side. “It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair!” and she streaked away across the frost-scorched meadow.

And as she left, I caught a delightful, laughing picture of two youngsters racing across a little lake, reeling and spinning as the waves under their feet lifted and swirled, wrapping white lace around their slender brown ankles. Everything was blue and silver and laughter and fun. I was caught up in the wonder and pleasure until I suddenly realized that it wasn’t my memory at all. Thann and I had another little lake we loved more. I had seen someone else’s Happy Place that would dissolve like mine with the Home. Poor Lytha.

The crooked sun was melting the latest snow the day all of us Old Ones met beside the towering shells of the ships. Each Old One was wrapped against the chilly wind. No personal shields today. The need for power was greater for the task ahead than for comfort. Above us, the huge bright curved squares of metal, clasped each to each with the old joinings, composed the shining length of each ship. Almost I could have cried to see the scarred earth beneath them-the trampledness that would never green again, the scars that would never heal. I blinked up the brightness of the nearest ship, up to the milky sky, and blinked away from its strangeness.

“The time is short,” said the Oldest. “A week.”

“A week.” The sigh went through the Group.

“Tonight the ship loads must be decided upon. Tomorrow the inside machines must be finished. The next day, the fuel.” The Oldest shivered and wrapped himself in his scarlet mantle. “The fuel that we put so completely out of our minds after the Peace. Its potential for evil was more than its service to us. But it is there. It is still there.” He shivered again and turned to me.

“Tell us again,” he said. “We must complete the shells.” And I told them again, without words, only with the shaping of thought to thought. Then the company of Old Ones lifted slowly above the first ship, clasping hands in a circle like a group of dancing children and, leaning forward into the circle, thought the thought I had shaped for them.

For a long time there was only the thin fluting of the cold wind past the point of the ship and then the whole shell of metal quivered and dulled and became fluid. For the span of three heartbeats it remained so and then it hardened again, complete, smooth, seamless, one cohesive whole from tip to base, broken only by the round ports at intervals along its length.

In succession the other five ships were made whole, but the intervals between the ships grew longer and grayer as the strength drained from us, and, before we were finished, the sun had gone behind a cloud and we were all shadows leaning above shadows, fluttering like shadows.

The weakness caught me as we finished the last one. David received me as I drifted down, helpless, and folded on myself. He laid me on the brittle grass and sat panting beside me, his head drooping. I lay as though I had become fluid and knew that something more than the fatigue of the task we had just finished had drained me. “But I have to be strong!” I said desperately, knowing weakness had no destiny among the stars. I stared up at the gray sky while a tear drew a cold finger from the corner of my eye to my ear.

“We’re just not used to using the Power,” said David softly.

“I know, I know,” I said, knowing that he did not know. I closed my eyes and felt the whisper of falling snow upon my face, each palm-sized flake melting into a tear.

Lytha stared from me to David, her eyes wide and incredulous; “But you knew, Father! I told you! I told you Gathering Night?’

“I’m sorry, Lytha,” said David. “There was no other way to do it. Ships fell by lot and Timmy’s family and ours will be in different ships.”

“Then let me go to his ship or let him come to mine!” she cried, her cheeks flushing and paling.

“Families must remain together,” I said, my heart breaking for her. “Each ship leaves the Home with the assumption that it is alone. If you went in the other ship, we might never all be together again.”

“But Timmy and I-we might someday be a family! We might-” Lytha’s voice broke. She pressed the backs of her hands against her cheeks and paused. Then she went on quietly. “I would go with Timmy, even so.”

‘Chell and David exchanged distressed glances. “There’s not room for even one of you to change your place. The loads are computed, the arrangements finished,” I said, feeling as though I were slapping Lytha.

“And besides,” said ‘Chell, taking Lytha’s hands, “it isn’t as though you and Timmy were loves. You have only started two-ing. Oh, Lytha, it was such a short time ago that you had your Happy Day. Don’t rush so into growing up!”

“And if I told you Timmy is my love!” cried Lytha.

“Can you tell us so in truth, Lytha?” said ‘Chell, “and say that Timmy feels that you are his love?”

Lytha’s eyes dropped. “Not for sure,” she whispered. “But in time-” She threw back her head impetuously, light swirling across her dark hair. “It isn’t fair! We haven’t had time!” she cried. “Why did all this have to happen now? Why not later? Or sooner?” she faltered, “before we started two-ing! If we have to part now, we might never know-or live our lives without a love because he is really-I am-” She turned and ran from the room, her face hidden.

I sighed and eased myself up from the chair. “I’m old, David,” I said. “I ache with age. Things like this weary me beyond any resting.”

It was something after midnight the next night that I felt Neil call to me. The urgency of his call hurried me into my robe and out of the door, quietly, not to rouse the house.

“Eva-lee.” His greeting hands on my shoulders were cold through my robe and the unfamiliar chilly wind whipped my hems around my bare ankles. “Is Lytha home?”

“Lytha?” The unexpectedness of the question snatched the last web of sleepiness out of my mind. “Of course. Why?”

“I don’t think she is,” said Neil. “Timmy’s gone with all our camping gear and I think she’s gone with him.”

My mind flashed back into the house, Questing. Before my hurried feet could get there, I knew Lytha was gone. But I had to touch the undented pillow and lift the smooth spread before I could convince myself. Back in the garden that flickered black and gold as swollen clouds raced across the distorted full moon, Neil and I exchanged concerned looks.

“Where could they have gone?” he asked. “Poor kids. I’ve already Quested the whole neighborhood and I sent Rosh up to the hillplace to get something-he thought. He brought it back but said nothing about the kids.”

I could see the tightening of the muscles in his jaws as he tilted his chin in the old familiar way, peering at me in the moonlight.

“Did Timmy say anything to you about-about anything?” I stumbled.

“Nothing-the only thing that could remotely-well, you know both of them were upset about being in different ships and Timmy-well, he got all worked up and said he didn’t believe anything was going to happen to the Home, that it was only a late spring and he thought we were silly to go rushing off into Space-“

“Lytha’s words Timmyized,” I said. “We’ve got to find them.”

“Carla’s frantic.” Neil shuffled his feet and put his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders as the wind freshened. “If only we had some idea. If we don’t find them tonight we’ll have to alert the Group tomorrow. Timmy’d never live down the humiliation-“

“I know-‘Touch a teener-touch a tender spot.’” I quoted absently, my mind chewing on something long forgotten or hardly noticed. “Clearance,” I murmured. And Neil closed his mouth on whatever he was going to say as I waited patiently for the vague drifting and isolated flashes in my mind to reproduce the thought I sought.

-Like white lace around their bare brown ankles-

“I have it,” I said. “At least I have an idea. Go tell Carla I’ve gone for them. Tell her not to worry.”

“Blessings,” said Neil, his hands quick and heavy on my shoulders. “You and Thann have always been our cloak against the wind, our hand up the hill-” And he was gone toward Tangle-meadows and Carla.

You and Thann-you and Thann. I was lifting through the darkness, my personal shield activated against the acceleration of my going. Even Neil forgets sometimes that Thann is gone on ahead, I thought, my heart lifting to the memory of Thann’s aliveness. And suddenly the night was full of Thann-of Thann and me-laughing in the skies, climbing the hills, dreaming in the moonlight. Four-ing with Carla and Neil. Two-ing after Gathering Day. The bittersweet memories came so fast that I almost crashed into the piny sighings of a hillside. I lifted above it barely in time. One treetop drew its uppermost twig across the curling of the bare sole of my foot.

Maybe Timmy’s right! I thought suddenly. Maybe Simon and the Oldest are all wrong. How can I possibly leave the Home with Thann still here-waiting. Then I shook myself, quite literally, somersaulting briskly in mid-air. Foolish thoughts, trying to cram Thann back into the limitations of an existence he had outgrown!

I slanted down into the cup of the hills toward the tiny lake I had recognized from Lytha’s thought. This troubled night it had no glitter or gleam. Its waves were much too turbulent for walking or dancing or even for daring. I landed on a pale strip of sand at its edge and shivered as a wave dissolved the sand under my feet into a shaken quiver and then withdrew to let it solidify again.

“Lytha!” I called softly, Questing ahead of my words.

“Lytha!” There was no response in the wind-filled darkness, I lifted to the next pale crescent of sand, feeling like a driven cloud myself. “Lytha! Lytha!” Calling on the family band so it would be perceptible to her alone and Timmy wouldn’t have to know until she told him. “Lytha!”

“Gramma!” Astonishment had squeezed out the answer.

“Gramma!” The indignation was twice as heavy to make up for the first involuntary response.

“May I come to you?” I asked, taking refuge from my own emotion in ritual questions that would leave Lytha at least the shreds of her pride. There was no immediate reply.

“May I come to you? ” I repeated.

“You may come.” Her thoughts were remote and cold as she guided me in to the curve of hillside and beach.

She and Timmy were snug and secure and very unhappily restless in the small camp cubicle. They had even found some Glowers somewhere. Most of them had died of the lack of summer, but this small cluster clung with their fragile-looking legs to the roof of the cubicle and shed a warm golden light over the small area. My heart contracted with pity and my eyes stung a little as I saw how like a child’s playhouse they had set up the cubicle, complete with the two sleeping mats carefully the cubicle’s small width apart with a curtain hiding them from each other.

They had risen ceremoniously as I entered, their faces carefully respectful to an Old One-no Gramma-look in the face of either. I folded up on the floor and they sat again, their hands clasping each other for comfort.

“There is scarcely time left for an outing,” I said casually, holding up one finger to the Glowers. One loosed itself and glided down to clasp its wiry feet around my finger. Its glowing paled and flared and hid any of our betraying expressions. Under my idle talk I could feel the cry of the two youngsters-wanting some way in honor to get out of this impasse. Could I find the way or would they stubbornly have to-

“We have our lives before us.” Timmy’s voice was carefully expressionless.

“A brief span if it’s to be on the Home,” I said. “We must be out before the week ends.”

“We do not choose to believe that.” Lytha’s voice trembled a little.

“I respect your belief,” I said formally, “but fear you have insufficient evidence to support it.”

“Even so,” her voice was just short of a sob. “Even so, however short, we will have it together-“

“Yes, without your mothers or fathers or any of us,” I said placidly. “And then finally, soon, without the Home. Still it has its points. It isn’t given to everyone to be-in-at the death of a world. It’s a shame that you’ll have no one to tell it to. That’s the best part of anything, you know, telling it-sharing it.”

Lytha’s face crumpled and she turned it away from me.

“And if the Home doesn’t die,” I went on, “that will truly be a joke on us. We won’t even get to laugh about it because we won’t be able to come back, being so many days gone, not knowing. So you will have the whole Home to yourself. Just think! A whole Home! A new world to begin all over again-alone-” I saw the two kids’ hands convulse together and Timmy’s throat worked painfully. So did mine. I knew the aching of having to start a new world over-alone. After Thann was Called. “But such space! An emptiness from horizon to horizon-from pole to pole-for you two! Nobody else anywhere-anywhere. If the Home doesn’t die-“

Lytha’s slender shoulders were shaking now, and they both turned their so-young faces to me. I nearly staggered under the avalanche of their crying out-all without a word. They poured out all their longing and uncertainty and protest and rebellion. Only the young could build up such a burden and have the strength to bear it. Finally Timmy came to words.

“We only want a chance. Is that too much to ask? Why should this happen, now, to us?”

“Who are we,” I asked sternly, “to presume to ask why of the Power? For all our lives we have been taking happiness and comfort and delight and never asking why, but now that sorrow and separation, pain and discomfort are coming to us from the same Power, we are crying why. We have taken unthinkingly all that has been given to us unasked, but now that we must take sorrow for a while, you want to refuse to take, like silly babies whose milk is cold!”

I caught a wave of desolation and lostness from the two and hurried on. “But don’t think the Power has forgotten you. You are as completely enwrapped now as you ever were. Can’t you trust your love-or your possible love to the Power that suggested love to you in the first place? I promise you, I promise you, that no matter where you go, together or apart if the Power leaves you life, you will find love. And even if it turns out that you do not find it together, you’ll never forget these first magical steps you have taken together towards your own true loves.”

I let laughter into my voice. “Things change! Remember, Lytha, it wasn’t so long ago that Timmy was a-if you’ll pardon the expression-‘gangle-legged, clumsy poodah that I’d rather be caught dead than ganging with, let alone two-ing.’”

“And he was, too!” Lytha’s voice had a hiccough in it, but a half smile, too.

“You were no vision of delight, yourself,” said Timmy. “I never saw such stringy hair-“

“I was supposed to look like that-“

Their wrangling was a breath of fresh air after the unnatural, uncomfortable emotional binge they had been on.

“It’s quite possible that you two might change-” I stopped abruptly. “Wait!” I said. “Listen!”

“To what?” Lytha’s face was puzzled. How could I tell her I heard Simon crying. “Gramma! Gramma!” Simon at home, in bed miles and miles-

“Out, quick!” I scrambled up from the floor. “Oh, hurry!” Panic was welling up inside me. The two snatched up their small personal bundles as I pushed them, bewildered and protesting ahead of me out into the inky blackness of the violent night. For a long terrified moment I stood peering up into the darkness, trying to interpret! Then I screamed, “Lift! Lift!” and, snatching at them both, I launched us upward, away from the edge of the lake. The clouds snatched back from the moon and its light poured down onto the convulsed lake. There was a crack like the loudest of thunder-a grinding, twisting sound-the roar and surge of mighty waters, and the lake bed below us broke cleanly from one hill to another, pulling itself apart and tilting to pour all its moon-bright waters down into the darkness of the gigantic split in the earth. And the moon was glittering only on the shining mud left behind in the lake bottom. With a frantic speed that seemed so slow I enveloped the children and shot with them as far up and away as I could before the earsplitting roar of returning steam threw us even farther. We reeled drunkenly away, and away, until we stumbled across the top of a hill. We clung to each other in terror as the mighty plume of steam rose and rose and spilt the clouds and still rose, rolling white and awesome. Then, as casually as a shutting door, the lake bed tilted back and closed itself. In the silence that followed, I fancied I could hear the hot rain beginning to fall to fill the emptiness of the lake again-a pool of rain no larger than my hand in a lake bottom.

“Oh, poor Home,” whispered Lytha. “poor hurting Home! It’s dying!” And then, on the family band, Lytha whispered to me Timmy’s my love, for sure, Gramma, and I am his, but we’re willing to let the Power hold our love for us, until your promise is kept.

I gathered the two to me and I guess we all wept a little, but we had no words to exchange, no platitudes, only the promise, the acquiescence, the trust-and the sorrow.

We went home. Neil met us just beyond our feather-pen and received Timmy with a quiet thankfulness and they went home together. Lytha and I went first into our household’s Quiet Place and then to our patient beds.

I stood with the other Old Ones high on the cliff above the narrow valley, staring down with them at the raw heap of stones and earth that scarred the smooth valley floor. All eyes were intent on the excavation and every mind so much with the Oldest as he toiled out of sight, that our concentrations were almost visible flames above each head.

I heard myself gasp with the others as the Oldest slowly emerged, his clumsy heavy shielding hampering his lifting. The brisk mountain breeze whined as it whipped past suddenly activated personal shields as we reacted automatically to possible danger even though our shields were tissue paper to tornadoes against this unseen death should it be loosed. The Oldest stepped back from the hole until the sheer rock face stopped him. Slowly a stirring began in the shadowy depths and then the heavy square that shielded the thumb-sized block within lifted into the light. It trembled and turned and set itself into the heavy metal box prepared for it. The lid clicked shut. By the time six boxes were filled, I felt the old-or rather, the painfully new-weariness seize me and I clung to David’s arm. He patted my hand, but his eyes were wide with dreaming and I forced myself upright. “I don’t like me any more,” I thought. “Why do I do things like this? Where has my enthusiasm and wonder gone? I am truly old and yet-” I wiped the cold beads of sweat from my upper lip and, lifting with the others, hovered over the canyon, preparatory to conveying the six boxes to the six shells of ships that they were to sting into life.

It was the last day. The sun was shining with a brilliance it hadn’t known in weeks. The winds that wandered down from the hills were warm and sweet. The earth beneath us that had so recently learned to tremble and shift was quietly solid for a small while. Everything about the Home was suddenly so dear that it seemed a delirious dream that death was less than a week away for it. Maybe it was only some preadolescent, unpatterned behavior-But one look at Simon convinced me. His eyes were aching with things he had had to See. His face was hard under the soft contours of childhood and his hands trembled as he clasped them. I hugged him with my heart and he smiled a thank you and relaxed a little.

‘Chell and I set the house to rights and filled the vases with fresh water and scarlet leaves because there were no flowers. David opened the corral gate and watched the beasts walk slowly out into the tarnished meadows. He threw wide the door of the feather-pen and watched the ruffle of feathers, the inquiring peering, the hesitant walk into freedom. He smiled as the master of the pen strutted vocally before the flock. Then Eve gathered up the four eggs that lay rosy and new in the nests and carried them into the house to put them in the green egg dish.

The family stood quietly together. “Go say good-by,” said David. “Each of you say good-by to the Home.”

And everyone went, each by himself, to his favorite spot. Even Eve burrowed herself out of sight in the koomatka bush where the leaves locked above her head and made a tiny Eve-sized green twilight. I could hear her soft croon, “Inna blaza glory, play-People! Inna blaza glory!”

I sighed to see Lytha’s straight-as-an-arrow flight toward Timmy’s home. Already Timmy was coming, I turned away with a pang. Supposing even after the lake they-No, I comforted myself. They trust the Power—

How could I go to any one place I wondered, standing by the windows of my room. All of the Home was too dear to leave. When I went I would truly be leaving Thann-all the paths he walked with me, the grass that bent to his step, the trees that shaded him in summer, the very ground that held his cast-aside. I slid to my knees and pressed my cheek against the side of the window frame. “Thann, Thann!” I whispered. “Be with me. Go with me since I must go. Be my strength!” And clasping my hands tight, I pressed my thumbs hard against my crying mouth.

We all gathered again, solemn and tear-stained. Lytha was still frowning and swallowing to hold back her sobs. Simon looked at her, his eyes big and golden, but he said nothing and turned away. ‘Chell left the room quietly and, before she returned, the soft sound of music swelled from the walls. We all made the Sign and prayed the Parting prayers, for truly we were dying to this world. The whole house, the whole of the Home was a Quiet Place today and each of us without words laid the anguishing of this day of parting before the Presence and received comfort and strength.

Then each of us took up his share of personal belongings and was ready to go. We left the house, the music reaching after us as we went. I felt a part of me die when we could no longer hear the melody.

We joined the neighboring families on the path to the ships and there were murmurs and gestures and even an occasional excited laugh. No one seemed to want to lift. Our feet savored every step of this last walk on the Home. No one lifted, that is, except Eve, who was still intrigued by her new accomplishment. Her short little hops amused everyone and, by the time she had picked herself out of the dust three times and had been disentangled from the branches of overhanging trees twice and finally firmly set in place on David’s shoulder, there were smiles and tender laughter and the road lightened even though clouds were banking again.

I stood at the foot of the long lift to the door of the ship and stared upward. People brushing past me were only whisperings and passing shadows.

“How can they?” I thought despairingly out of the surge of weakness that left me clinging to the wall. “How can they do it? Leaving the Home so casually!” Then a warm hand crept into mine and I looked down into Simon’s eyes. “Come on, Gramma,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

“I-I-” I looked around me helplessly, then, kneeling swiftly, I took up a handful of dirt-a handful of the Home-and, holding it tightly, I lifted up the long slant with Simon.

Inside the ship we put our things away in their allotted spaces and Simon tugged me out into the corridor and into a room banked with dials and switches and all the vast array of incomprehensibles that we had all called into being for this terrible moment. No one was in the room except the two of us. Simon walked briskly to a chair in front of a panel and sat down.

“It’s all set,” he said, “for the sector of the sky they gave us, but it’s wrong.” Before I could stop him, his hands moved over the panels, shifting, adjusting, changing.

“Oh, Simon!” I whispered, “you mustn’t!”

“I must,” said Simon. “Now it’s set for the sky I See.”

“But they’ll notice and change them all back,” I trembled.

“No,” said Simon. “It’s such a small change that they won’t notice it. And we will be where we have to be when we have to be.”

It was as I stood there in the control room that I left the Home. I felt it fade away and become as faint as a dream. I said good-by to it so completely that it startled me to catch a glimpse of a mountaintop through one of the ports as we hurried back to our spaces. Suddenly my heart was light and lifting, so much so that my feet didn’t even touch the floor. Oh, how wonderful! What adventures ahead! I felt as though I were spiraling up into a bright Glory that outshone the sun-Then, suddenly, came the weakness. My very bones dissolved in me and collapsed me down on my couch. Darkness rolled across me and breathing was a task that took an my weakness to keep going. I felt vaguely the tightening of the restraining straps around me and the clasp of Simon’s hand around my clenched fist.

“Half an hour,” the Oldest murmured.

“Half an hour,” the People echoed, amplifying the murmur. I felt myself slipping into the corporate band of communication, feeling with the rest of the Group the incredible length and heartbreaking shortness of the time.

Then I lost the world again. I was encased in blackness. I was suspended, waiting, hardly even wondering.

And then it came-the Call.

How unmistakable! I was Called back into the Presence! My hours were totaled. It was all finished. This-side was a preoccupation that concerned me no longer. My face must have lighted as Thann’s had. All the struggle, all the sorrow, all the separation-finished. Now would come the three or four days during which I must prepare, dispose of my possessions, say my good-bys-Good-bys? I struggled up against the restraining straps. But we were leaving! In less than half an hour I would have no quiet, cool bed to lay me down upon when I left my body, no fragrant grass to have pulled up over my cast-aside, no solemn sweet remembrance by my family in the next Festival for those Called during the year!

Simon I called subvocally. You know! I cried. What shall 1 do?

I See you staying. His answer came placidly.

Staying? Oh how quickly I caught the picture! How quickly my own words came back to me, coldly white against the darkness of my confusion. Such space and emptiness from horizon to horizon, from pole to pole, from skytop to ground. And only me. Nobody else anywhere, anywhere!

Stay here all alone? I asked Simon. But he wasn’t Seeing me any more. Already I was alone. I felt the frightened tears start and then I heard Lytha’s trusting voice-until your promise is kept. All my fear dissolved. All my panic and fright blazed up suddenly in a repeat of the Call.

“Listen!” I cried, my voice high and excited, my heart surging joyously, “Listen!”

“Oh, David! Oh, ‘Chell! I’ve been Called! Don’t you hear it? Don’t you hear it!”

“Oh, Mother, no! No! You must be mistaken!” David loosed himself and bent over me.

“No,” whispered ‘Chell. “I feel it. She is Called.”

“Now I can stay,” I said, fumbling at the straps. “Help me, David, help me.”

“But you’re not summoned right now!” cried David. “Father knew four days before he was received into the Presence. We can’t leave you alone in a doomed, empty world!”

“An empty world!” I stood up quickly, holding to David to steady myself. “Oh, David! A world full of all dearness and nearness and remembering! And doomed? It will be a week yet. I will be received before then. Let me out! Oh, let me out!”

“Stay with us, Mother!” cried David, taking both my hands in his. “We need you. We can’t let you go. All the tumult and upheaval that’s to start so soon for the Home-“

“How do we know what tumult and upheaval you will be going through in the Crossing?” I asked. “But beyond whatever comes there’s a chance of a new life waiting for you. But for me-What of four days from now? What would you do with my cast-aside? What could you do but push it out into the black nothingness. Let it be with the Home. Let it at least become dust among familiar dust!” I felt as excited as a teener. “Oh, David! To be with Thann again!”

I turned to Lytha and quickly unfastened her belt.

“There’ll be room for one more in this ship,” I said.

For a long moment, we looked into each other’s eyes and then, almost swifter than thought, Lytha was up and running for the big door. My thoughts went ahead of her and before Lytha’s feet lifted out into the open air, all the Old Ones in the ship knew what had happened and their thoughts went out. Before Lytha was halfway up the little hills that separated ship from ship, Timmy surged into sight and gathered her close as they swung around toward our ship.

Minutes ran out of the half hour like icy beads from a broken string, but finally I was slanting down from the ship, my cheeks wet with my own tears and those of my family. Clearly above the clang of the closing door I heard Simon’s call. Good-by, Gramma! I told you it’d be all right. See-you-soon!

Hurry hurry hurry whispered my feet as I ran. Hurry hurry hurry whispered the wind as I lifted away from the towering ships. Now now now whispered my heart as I turned back from a safe distance, my skirts whipped by the rising wind, my hair lashing across my face.

The six slender ships pointing at the sky were like silver needles against the rolling black clouds. Suddenly there were only five-then four-then three. Before I could blink the tears from my eyes, the rest were gone, and the ground where they had stood flowed back on itself and crackled with cooling.

The fingers of the music drew me back into the home. I breathed deeply of the dear familiar odors. I straightened a branch of the scarlet leaves that had slipped awry in the blue vase. I steadied myself against a sudden shifting under my feet and my shield activated as hail spattered briefly through the window. I looked out, filled with a great peace, to the swell of browning hills, to the upward reach of snow-whitened mountains, to the brilliant huddled clumps of trees sowing their leaves on the icy wind. “My Home!” I whispered, folding my heart around it all, knowing what my terror and lostness would have been had I stayed behind without the Call.

With a sigh, I went out to the kitchen and counted the four rosy eggs in the green dish. I fingered the stove into flame and, lifting one of the eggs, cracked it briskly against the pan.

That night there were no stars, but the heavy rolls of clouds were lighted with fitful lightnings and somewhere far over the horizon the molten heart of a mountain range was crimson and orange against the night. I lay on my bed letting the weakness wash over me, a tide that would soon bear me away. The soul is a lonely voyager at any time, but the knowledge that I was the last person in a dying world was like a weight crushing me. I was struggling against the feeling when I caught a clear, distinct call-“Gramma!”

“Simon!” My lips moved to his name.

“We’re all fine, Gramma, and I just Saw Eve with two children of her own, so they will make it to a new Home.”

“Oh, Simon! I’m so glad you told me!” I clutched my bed as it rocked and twisted. I heard stones falling from the garden wall, then one wall of my room dissolved into dust that glowed redly before it settled.

“Things are a little untidy here,” I said. “I must get out another blanket. It’s a little drafty, too.”

“You’ll be all right, Gramma,” Simon’s thought came warmly. “Will you wait for me when you get Otherside?”

“If I can,” I promised.

“Good night, Gramma,” said Simon.

“Good night, Simon.” I cradled my face on my dusty pillow. “Good night.”

“Oh!” breathed Meris, out of her absorption. “All alone like that! The last, last anyone, anywhere-“

“But she had the Home longer than anyone else,” said Valancy. “She had that dear familiarity to close her eyes upon before opening them in the Presence-“

“But how could Bethie possibly remember-” began Meris.

“It’s something we can’t quite explain,” said Jemmy. “It’s a Group consciousness that unites us across time and distance. I guess Simon’s communicating with Eva-lee before he was Called brought her Assembling more directly to us. Eve, you know, was Bethie’s mother.”

“It’s overwhelming,” said Karen soberly. “We know, of course, about the Home and how it was lost, but until you’re actually inside an emotion, you can’t really comprehend it. Just imagine, to know that the solidness of earth beneath your feet is to become dust scattered across the sky so soon-so soon!”

The group was silent for a while, listening to memories and to a Past that was so Present.

The silence was suddenly shattered by a crashing roar that startled everyone into an awareness of Now.

“Good heavens!” cried Meris. “What’s that!”

“Adonday veeah!” muttered Jemmy. “They’ve got that old clunker going again. Johannan must have done something drastic to it.”

“Well, he started it just in time to stop it,” said Valancy. “We’ve got a journey to go and we’d better eat and run. Karen, is it all ready?”

“Yes,” said Karen, heading for the shadowy house. “Meris has a lovely kitchen. I move that we move in there to eat. It’s chilling a little out here now. Jemmy, will you get the boys?”

“I’ll set the table!” cried Lala, launching herself airborne toward the kitchen door.

“Lala.” Valancy’s voice was quiet, but Lala checked in mid-flight and tumbled down to her feet.

“Oh!” she said, her hands over her mouth. “I did forget, after I promised!”

“Yes, you did forget,” said Valancy. her voice disappointed, “and after you promised.”

“I guess I need some more discipline,” said Lala solemnly.

“A promise is not lightly broken.”

“What would you suggest?” asked Karen from the kitchen door, as solemnly as Lala.

“Not set the table?” suggested Lala, with a visible reluctance. “Not tonight,” she went on gauging carefully the adult reaction. “Not for a week?” She sighed and capitulated. “Not set the table for a whole month. And every meal remember a promise is not lightly broken. Control is necessary. Never be unEarth away from the Group unless I’m told to.” And she trudged, conscientiously heavy-footed, into the house with Karen.

“Isn’t that a little harsh?” asked Marls. “She does so love to set the table.”

“She chose the discipline,” said Valancy. “She must learn not to act thoughtlessly. Maybe she has a little more to remember in the way of rules and regulations than the usual small child, but it must become an automatic part of her behavior.”

“But at six-” protested Meris, then laughed “-or is it five!”

“Five or six, she understands,” said Valancy. “An undisciplined child is an abomination under any circumstances. And doubly so when it’s possible to show off as spectacularly as Lala could. Debbie had quite a problem concerning control when she returned from the New Home, and she was no child.”

“Returned from the New Home?” said Meris, pausing in the door. “Someone else? Oh, Valancy, do you have to go home tonight? Couldn’t you stay for a while and tell me some more? You want to Assemble anyway, don’t you? Couldn’t you now? You can’t leave me hanging like this!”

“Well,” Valancy smiled and followed Meris into the kitchen. “That’s an idea. We’ll take it up after supper.”

Jemmy sipped his after-supper coffee and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “This business of Assembling. We have already Assembled our history from when Valancy joined our Group up to the time Lala and the ship came. We did it while we were all trying to make up our minds whether to leave Earth or stay. Davy’s recording gadget has preserved it for us. I think it would be an excellent idea for us to get Eva-lee’s story recorded, too, and whatever other ones are available to us or can be made available.”

“Mother Assembled a lot because she was separated from the People when she was so young,” said Bethie softly.

“Assembling was almost her only comfort, especially before and after Father. She didn’t know anything about the rest of her family-” Bethie whitened. “Oh, must we remember the bad times! The aching, hurting, cruel times?”

“There was kindness and love and sacrifice for us interwoven with the cruel times, too, you know,” said Jemmy. “If we refuse to remember those times, we automatically refuse to remember the goodness that we found along with the evil.”

“Yes,” admitted Bethie. “Yes, of course.”

“Well, if I can’t persuade all of you to stay, why can’t Bethie stay a while longer and Assemble?” asked Meris.

“Then she’ll have a lot of material ready for Davy’s gadget when she gets home.”

And so it was that Meris, Mark, and Bethie stood in the driveway and watched the rest of the party depart prosaically by car for the canyon-if you can call prosaic the shuddering, slam-bang departing of the Overland, now making up clamorously for its long afternoon of silence.

Assembling is not a matter of turning a faucet on and dodging the gushing of memories. For several days Bethie drifted, speechless and perhaps quite literally millions of miles away, through the house, around the patio, up and down the quiet street and back into the patio. She came to the table at mealtimes and sometimes ate. Other times her eyes were too intent on far away and long ago to notice food. At times tears streaked her face and once she woke Mark and Meris with a sharp cry in the night. Meris was worried by her pallor and the shadows on her face as the days passed.

Then finally came the day when Bethie’s eyes were suddenly back in focus and, relaxing with a sigh onto the couch, she smiled at Meris.

“Hi!” she said shyly. “I’m back.”

“And all in one piece again,” said Maria. “And about time, too! ‘Licia has a drake-tail in her hair now-all both of them. And she smiled once when it couldn’t possibly have been a gas pain!”

So, after supper that night, Mark and Meris sat in the deepening dusk of the patio, each holding lightly one of Bethie’s hands.

“This one,” said Bethie, her smile fading, “is one I didn’t enjoy. Not all of it. But, as Jemmy said, it had good things mixed in.”

Hands tightened on hands, then relaxed as the two listened to Bethie Assembling, subvocally

ANGELS UNAWARES

HEBREWS 13:2

I still have it, the odd, flower-shaped piece of metal, showing the flow marks on top and the pocking of sand and gravel on its bottom. It fits my palm comfortably with my fingers clasped around it, and has fitted it so often that the edges are smooth and burnished now, smooth against the fine white line of the scar where the sharp, shining, still-hot edge gashed me when I snatched it up, unbelievingly, from where it had dripped, molten, from the sloping wall to the sandy floor of the canyon beyond Margin. It is a Remembrance thing and, as I handled it just now, looking unseeingly out across the multiple roofs of Margin Today, it recalled to me vividly Margin Yesterday-and even before Margin.

We had been on the road only an hour when we came upon the scene. For fifteen minutes or so before, however, there had been an odd smell on the wind, one that crinkled my nose and made old Nig snort and toss his head, shaking the harness and disturbing Prince, who lifted his patient head, looked around briefly, then returned to the task.

We were the task, Nils and I and our wagonload of personal belongings, trailing behind us Molly, our young Jersey cow. We were on our way to Margin to establish a home. Nils was to start his shining new mining engineering career, beginning as superintendent of the mine that had given birth to Margin. This was to be a first step only, of course, leading to more accomplished, more rewarding positions culminating in all the vague, bright, but most wonderful of futures that could blossom from this rather unprepossessing present seed. We were as yet three days’ journey from Margin when we rounded the sharp twist of the trail, our iron tires grating in the sand of the wash, and discovered the flat.

Nils pulled the horses up to a stop. A little below us and near the protective bulge of the gray granite hillside were the ruins of a house and the crumpled remains of sheds at one end of a staggering corral. A plume of smoke lifted finger-straight in the early morning air. There was not a sign of life anywhere.

Nils flapped the reins and clucked to the horses. We crossed the flat, lurching a little when the left wheels dipped down into one of the cuts that, after scoring the flat disappeared into the creek.

“Must have burned down last night,” said Nils, securing the reins and jumping down. He lifted his arms to help me from the high seat and held me in a tight, brief hug as he always does. Then he released me and we walked over to the crumple of the corral.

“All the sheds went,” he said, “and. apparently the animals, too.” He twisted his face at the smell that rose from the smoldering mass.

“They surely would have saved the animals,” I said, frowning. “They wouldn’t have left them locked in a burning shed.”

“If they were here when the fire hit,” said Nils.

I looked over at the house. “Not much of a house. It doesn’t look lived in at all. Maybe this is an abandoned homestead. In that case, though, what about the animals?”

Nils said nothing. He had picked up a length of stick and was prodding in the ashes.

“I’m going to look at the house,” I said, glad of an excuse to turn away from the heavy odor of charred flesh.

The house was falling in on itself. The door wouldn’t open and the drunken windows spilled a few shards of splintered glass out onto the sagging front perch. I went around to the back. It had been built so close to the rock that there was only a narrow roofed-over passage between the rock and the house. The back door sagged on one hinge and I could see the splintered floor behind. It must have been quite a nice place at one time-glass in the windows-a board floor-when most of us in the Territory made do with a hard trampled dirt floor and butter muslin in the windows.

I edged through the door and cautiously picked my way across the creaking, groaning floor. I looked up to see if there was a loft of any kind and felt my whole body throb one huge throb of terror and surprise! Up against the sharp splintering of daylight through a shattered roof, was a face-looking down at me! It was a wild, smudged, dirty face, surrounded by a frizz of dark hair that tangled and wisped across the filthy cheeks. It stared down at me from up among the tatters of what had been a muslin ceiling, then the mouth opened soundlessly, and the eyes rolled and went shut. I lunged forward, almost instinctively, and caught the falling body full in my arms, crumpling under it to the floor. Beneath me the splintered planks gave way and sagged down into the shallow air space under the floor.

I screamed, “Nils!” and heard an answering, “Gail!” and the pounding of his running feet.

We carried the creature outside the ruined house and laid it on the scanty six-weeks grass that followed over the sand like a small green river the folds in the earth that held moisture the longest. We straightened the crumpled arms and legs and it was a creature no longer but a girl-child. I tried to pull down the tattered skirt to cover more seemly, but the bottom edge gave way without tearing and I had the soft smudge of burned fabric and soot between my fingers. I lifted the head to smooth the sand under it and stopped, my attention caught.

“Look, Nils the hair. Half of it’s burned away. This poor child must have been in the fire. She must have tried to free the animals—”

“It’s not animals,” said Nils, his voice tight and angered.

“They’re people.”

“People!” I gasped. “Oh, no!”

“At least four,” nodded Nils.

“Oh, how awful!” I said, smoothing the stub of hair away from the quiet face. “The fire must have struck in the night.”

“They were tied,” said Nils shortly. “Hand and foot.”

“Tied? But, Nils-“

“Tied. Deliberately burned-“

“Indians!” I gasped, scrambling to my feet through the confusion of my skirts. “Oh, Nils!”

“There have been no Indian raids in the Territory for almost five years. And the last one was on the other side of the Territory. They told me at Margin that there had never been any raids around here. There are no Indians in this area.”

“Then who-what-” I dropped down beside the still figure. “Oh, Nils,” I whispered. “What kind of a country have we come to?”

“No matter what kind it is,” said Nils, “we have a problem here. Is the child dead?”

“No.” My hand on the thin chest felt the slight rise and fall of breathing. Quickly I flexed arms and legs and probed lightly. “I can’t find any big hurt. But so dirty and ragged!”

We found the spring under a granite overhang halfway between the house and the corral. Nils rummaged among our things in the wagon and found me the hand basin, some rags, and soap. We lighted a small fire and heated water in a battered bucket Nils dredged out of the sand below the spring. While the water was heating, I stripped away the ragged clothing. The child had on some sort of a one-piece undergarment that fitted as closely as her skin and as flexible. It covered her from shoulder to upper thigh and the rounding of her body under it made me revise my estimate of her age upward a little. The garment was undamaged by the fire but I couldn’t find any way to unfasten it to remove it so I finally left it and wrapped the still unconscious girl in a quilt. Then carefully I bathed her, except for her hair, wiping the undergarment, which came clean and bright without any effort at all. I put her into one of my nightgowns, which came close enough to fitting her since I am of no great size myself.

“What shall I do about her hair?” I asked Nils, looking at the snarled, singed tousle of it. “Half of it is burned off clear up to her ear.”

“Cut the rest of it to match,” said Nils. “Is she burned anywhere?”

“No,” I replied, puzzled. “Not a sign of a burn, and yet her clothing was almost burned away and her hair-” I felt a shiver across my shoulders and looked around the flat apprehensively, though nothing could be more flatly commonplace than the scene. Except-except for the occasional sullen wisp of smoke from the shed ruins.

“Here are the scissors.” Nils brought them from the wagon. Reluctantly, because of the heavy flow of the tresses across my wrist, I cut away the long dark hair until both sides of her head matched, more or less. Then, scooping out the sand to lower the basin beneath her head, I wet and lathered and rinsed until the water came clear, then carefully dried the hair, which, released from length and dirt, sprang into profuse curls all over her head.

“What a shame to have cut it,” I said to Nils, holding the damp head in the curve of my elbow. “How lovely it must have been.” Then I nearly dropped my burden. The eyes were open and looking at me blankly. I managed a smile and said, “Hello! Nils, hand me a cup of water.”

At first she looked at the water as though at a cup of poison, then, with a shuddering little sigh, drank it down in large hasty gulps.

“That’s better now, isn’t it?” I said, hugging her a little. There was no answering word or smile, but only a slow tightening of the muscles under my hands until, still in my arms, the girl had withdrawn from me completely. I ran my hand over her curls. “I’m sorry we had to cut it, but it was-” I bit back my words. I felt muscles lifting, so I helped the girl sit up. She looked around in a daze and then her eyes were caught by a sullen up-puff of smoke. Seeing what she was seeing, I swung my shoulder between her and the ashes of the shed. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her fingers bit into my arm as she dragged herself to see past me.

“Let her look,” Nils said. “She knows what happened. Let her see the end of it. Otherwise she’ll wonder all her life.” He took her from me and carried her over to the corral. I couldn’t go. I busied myself with emptying the basin and burying the charred clothing. I spread the quilt out to receive the child when they returned.

Nils finally brought her back and put her down on the quilt. She lay, eyes shut, as still as if breath had left her, too. Then two tears worked themselves out of her closed lids, coursed down the sides of her checks, and lost themselves in the tumble of curls around her ears. Nils took the shovel and grimly tackled the task of burying the bodies.

I built up the fire again and began to fix dinner. The day was spending itself rapidly but, late or not, when Nils finished, we would leave. Eating a large meal now, we could piece for supper and travel, if necessary, into the hours of darkness until this place was left far behind.

Nils finally came back, pausing at the spring to snort and blow through double handful after double handful of water. I met him with a towel.

“Dinner’s ready,” I said. “We can leave as soon as we’re finished.”

“Look what I found.” He handed me a smudged tatter of paper. “It was nailed to the door of the shed. The door didn’t burn.”

I held the paper gingerly and puzzled over it. The writing was almost illegible-Ex. 22:18.

“What is it?” I asked. “It doesn’t say anything.”

“Quotation,” said Nile. “That’s a quotation from the Bible.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. Let’s see. Exodus, Chapter 22, verse 18. Do you know it?”

“I’m not sure, but I have an idea. Can you get at the Bible? I’ll verify it.”

“It’s packed in one of my boxes at the bottom of the load.. Shall we-“

“Not now,” said Nils. “Tonight when we make camp.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“I’d rather wait,” said Nils. “I hope I’m wrong.”

We ate. I tried to rouse the girl, but she turned away from me. I put half a slice of bread in her hand and closed her fingers over it and tucked it close to her mouth. Halfway through our silent meal, a movement caught my eye. The girl had turned to hunch herself over her two hands that now clasped the bread, tremblingly. She was chewing cautiously. She swallowed with an effort and stuffed her mouth again with bread, tears streaking down her face. She ate as one starved, and, when she had finished the bread, I brought her a cup of milk. I lifted her shoulders and held her as she drank. I took the empty cup and lowered her head to the quilt. For a moment my hand was caught under her head and I felt a brief deliberate pressure of her cheek against my wrist. Then she turned away.

Before we left the flat, we prayed over the single mound Nils had raised over the multiple grave. We had brought the girl over with us and she lay quietly, watching us. When we turned from our prayers, she held out in a shaking hand a white flower, so white that it almost seemed to cast a light across her face. I took it from her and put it gently on the mound. Then Nils lifted her and carried her to the wagon. I stayed a moment, not wanting to leave the grave lonely so soon. I shifted the white flower. In the sunlight its petals seemed to glow with an inner light, the golden center almost fluid. I wondered what kind of flower it could be. I lifted it and saw that it was just a daisy-looking flower after all, withering already in the heat of the day. I put it down again, gave a last pat to the mound, a last tag of prayer, and went back to the wagon.

By the time we made camp that night we were too exhausted from the forced miles and the heat and the events of the day to do anything but care for the animals and fall onto our pallets spread on the ground near the wagon. We had not made the next water hole because of the delay, but we carried enough water to tide us over. I was too tired to eat, but I roused enough to feed Nils on leftovers from dinner and to strain Molly’s milk into the milk crock. I gave the girl a cup of the fresh, warm milk and some more bread. She downed them both with a contained eagerness as though still starved. Looking at her slender shaking wrists and the dark hollows of her face, I wondered how long she had been so hungry.

We all slept heavily under the star-clustered sky, hut I was awakened somewhere in the shivery coolness of the night and reached to be sure the girl was covered. She was sitting up on the pallet, legs crossed tailor-fashion, looking up at the sky. I could see the turning of her head as she scanned the whole sky, back and forth, around and around, from zenith to horizon. Then she straightened slowly back down onto the quilt with an audible sigh.

I looked at the sky, too. It was spectacular with the stars of a moonless night here in the region of mountains and plains, but what had she been looking for? Perhaps she had just been enjoying being alive and able, still, to see the stars.

We started on again, very early, and made the next watering place while the shadows were still long with dawn.

“The wagons were here,” said Nils, “night before last, I guess.”

“What wagons?” I asked, pausing in my dipping of water.

“We’ve been in their tracks ever since the flat back there,” said Nils. “Two light wagons and several riders.”

“Probably old tracks-” I started. “Oh, but you said they were here night before last. Do you suppose they had anything to do with the fire back there?”

“No signs of them before we got to the flat,” said Nils.

“Two recent campfires here-as if they stayed the night here and made a special trip to the flat and back here again for the next night.”

“A special trip.” I shivered. “Surely you can’t think that civilized people in this nineteenth century could be so violent-so-so-I mean people just don’t-” My words died before the awful image in my mind.

“Don’t tie up other people and burn them?” Nils started shifting the water keg back toward the wagon. “Gail, our next camp is supposed to be at Grafton’s Vow. I think we’d better take time to dig out the Bible before we go on.”

So we did. And we looked at each other over Nils’s pointing finger and the flattened paper he had taken from the shed door.

“Oh, surely not!” I cried horrified. “It can’t be! Not in this day and age!”

“It can be,” said Nils. “In any age when people pervert goodness, love, and obedience and set up a god small enough to fit their shrunken souls.” And his finger traced again the brief lines: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

“Why did you want to check that quotation before we got to Grafton’s Vow?” I asked.

“Because it’s that kind of place,” said Nils. “They warned me at the county seat. In fact, some thought it might be wise to take the other trail-a day longer-one dry camp-but avoid Grafton’s Vow. There have been tales of stonings and-“

“What kind of place is it, anyway?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Nils. “I’ve heard some very odd stories about it though. It was founded about twenty years ago by Arnold Grafton. He brought his little flock of followers out here to establish the new Jerusalem. They’re very strict and narrow. Don’t argue with them and no levity or lewdness. No breaking of God’s laws of which they say they have all. When they ran out of Biblical ones, they received a lot more from Grafton to fill in where God forgot.”

“But,” I was troubled, “aren’t they Christians?”

“They say so.” I helped Nils lift the keg. “Except they believe they have to conform to all the Old Testament laws, supplemented by all those that Grafton has dictated. Then, if they obey enough of them well enough after a lifetime of struggle, Christ welcomes them into a heaven of no laws. Every law they succeed in keeping on earth, they will be exempted from keeping for all of eternity. So the stricter observance here, the greater freedom there. Imagine what their heaven must be-teetotaler here-rigidly chaste here-never kill here-never steal here-just save up for the promised Grand Release!”

“And Mr. Grafton had enough followers of that doctrine to found a town?” I asked, a little stunned.

“A whole town,” said Nits, “into which we will not be admitted. There is a campground outside the place where we will be tolerated for the night if they decide we won’t contaminate the area.”

At noon we stopped just after topping out at Millman’s Pass. The horses, lathered and breathing heavily, and poor dragged-along Molly, drooped grateful heads in the shadows of the aspen and pines.

I busied myself with the chuck box and was startled to see the girl sliding out of the wagon where we had bedded her down for the trip. She clung to the side of the wagon and winced as her feet landed on the gravelly hillside. She looked very young and slender and lost in the fullness of my nightgown, but her eyes weren’t quite so sunken and her mouth was tinged with color.

I smiled at her. “That gown is sort of long for mountain climbing. Tonight I’ll try to get to my other clothes and see if I can find something, I think my old blue skirt-” I stopped because she very obviously wasn’t understanding a word I was saying. I took a fold of the gown she wore and said, “Gown.”

She looked down at the crumpled white muslin and then at me but said nothing.

I put a piece of bread into her hands and said, “Bread.” She put the bread down carefully on the plate where I had stacked the other slices for dinner and said nothing. Then she glanced around, looked at me and, turning, walked briskly into the thick underbrush, her elbows high to hold the extra length of gown up above her bare feet.

“Nils!” I called in sudden panic. “She’s leaving!”

Nils laughed at me across the tarp he was spreading.

“Even the best of us,” he said, “have to duck into the bushes once in a while!”

“Oh, Nils!” I protested and felt my face redden as I carried the bread plate to the tarp. “Anyway, she shouldn’t be running around in a nightgown like that. What would Mr. Grafton say! And have you noticed? She hasn’t made a sound since we found her.” I brought the eating things to the tarp.

“Not one word. Not one sound.”

“Hmm,” said Nils, “you’re right. Maybe she’s a deaf-mute.”

“She hears,” I said, “I’m sure she hears,”

“Maybe she doesn’t speak English,” he suggested. “Her hair is dark. Maybe she’s Mexican. Or even Italian. We get all kinds out here on the frontier. No telling where she might be from.”

“But you’d think she’d make some sound. Or try to say something,” I insisted.

“Might be the shock,” said Nils soberly. “That was an awful thing to live through.”

“That’s probably it, poor child.” I looked over to where she had disappeared. “An awful thing. Let’s call her Marnie, Nils,” I suggested. “We need some sort of name to call her by.”

Nils laughed. “Would having the name close to you reconcile you a little to being separated from your little sister?”

I smiled back. “It does sound homey-Marnie, Marnie.”

As if I had called her, the girl, Marnie, came back from the bushes, the long gown not quite trailing the slope, completely covering her bare feet. Both her hands were occupied with the long stem of red bells she was examining closely. How graceful she is, I thought, How smoothly-Then my breath went out and I clutched the plate I held. That gown was a good foot too long for Marnie! She couldn’t possibly be walking with it not quite trailing the ground without holding it up! And where was the pausing that came between steps? I hissed at Nils. “Look!” I whispered hoarsely, “she’s-she’s floating! She’s not even touching the ground!”

Just at that moment Marnie looked up and saw us and read our faces. Her face crumpled into terror and she dropped down to the ground. Not only down to her feet, but on down into a huddle on the ground with the spray of flowers crushed under her.

I ran to her and tried to lift her, but she suddenly convulsed into a mad struggle to escape me. Nils came to help. We fought to hold the child who was so violent that I was afraid she’d hurt herself.