The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

ZENNA HENDERSON Ararat[11]

WE’VE had trouble with teachers in Cougar Canyon. It’s just an Accommodation school anyway, isolated and so unhandy to anything. There’s really nothing to hold a teacher. But the way The People bring forth their young, in quantities and with regularity, even our small Group can usually muster the nine necessary for the County School Superintendent to arrange for the schooling for the year.

Of course I’m past school age, Canyon school age, and have been for years, but if the tally came up one short in the Fall, I’d go back for a post-graduate course again. But now I’m working on a college level because Father finished me off for my high school diploma two summers ago. He’s promised me that if I do well this year I’ll get to go Outside next year and get my training and degree so I can be the teacher and we won’t have to go Outside for one any more. Most of the kids would just as soon skip school as not, but the Old Ones don’t hold with ignorance and the Old Ones have the last say around here.

Father is the head of the school board. That’s how I get in on lots of school things the other kids don’t. This summer when he wrote to the County Seat that we’d have more than our nine again this fall and would they find a teacher for us, he got back a letter saying they had exhausted their supply of teachers who hadn’t heard of Cougar Canyon and we’d have to dig up our own teacher this year. That “dig up” sounded like a dirty crack to me since we have the graves of four past teachers in the far corner of our cemetery. They sent us such old teachers, the homeless, the tottering, who were trying to piece out the end of their lives with a year here and a year there in jobs no one else wanted because there’s no adequate pension system in the state and most teachers seem to die in harness. And their oldness and their tottering were not sufficient in the Canyon where there are apt to be shocks for Outsiders—unintentional as most of them are.

We haven’t done so badly the last few years, though. The Old Ones say we’re getting adjusted—though some of the non-conformists say that The Crossing thinned our blood. It might be either or both or the teachers are just getting tougher. The last two managed to last until just before the year ended. Father took them in as far as Kerry Canyon and ambulances took them on in. But they were all right after a while in the sanatorium and they’re doing okay now. Before them, though, we usually had four teachers a year.

Anyway, Father wrote to a Teachers Agency on the coast and after several letters each way, he finally found a teacher.

He told us about it at the supper table.

“She’s rather young,” he said, reaching for a toothpick and tipping his chair back on its hind legs.

Mother gave Jethro another helping of pie and picked up her own fork again. “Youth is no crime,” she said, “and it’ll be a pleasant change for the children.”

“Yes, though it seems a shame.” Father prodded at a back tooth and Mother frowned at him. I wasn’t sure if it was for picking his teeth or for what he said. I knew he meant it seemed a shame to get a place like Cougar Canyon so early in a career. It isn’t that we’re mean or cruel, you understand. It’s only that they’re Outsiders and we sometimes forget—especially the kids.

“She doesn’t have to come,” said Mother. “She could say no.”

“Well, now—” Father tipped his chair forward. “Jethro, no more pie. You go on out and help ’Kiah bring in the wood. Karen, you and Lizbeth get started on the dishes. Hop to it, kids.”

And we hopped, too. Kids do to fathers in the Canyon, though I understand they don’t always Outside. It annoyed me because I knew Father wanted us out of the way so he could talk adult talk to Mother, so I told Lizbeth I’d clear the table and then worked as slowly as I could, and as quietly, listening hard.

“She couldn’t get any other job,” said Father. “The agency told me they had placed her twice in the last two years and she didn’t finish the year either place.”

“Well,” said Mother, pinching in her mouth and frowning. “If she’s that bad, why on earth did you hire her for the Canyon?”

“We have a choice?” laughed Father. Then he sobered. “No, it wasn’t for incompetency. She was a good teacher. The way she tells it, they just fired her out of a clear sky. She asked for recommendations and one place wrote, ‘Miss Carmody is a very competent teacher but we dare not recommend her for a teaching position.’”

“‘Dare not’?” asked Mother.

“‘Dare not,’” said Father. “The Agency assured me that they had investigated thoroughly and couldn’t find any valid reasons for the dismissals, but she can’t seem to find another job anywhere on the coast. She wrote me that she wanted to try another state.”

“Do you suppose she’s disfigured or deformed?” suggested Mother.

“Not from the neck up!” laughed Father. He took an envelope from his pocket. “Here’s her application picture.”

By this time I’d got the table cleared and I leaned over Father’s shoulder.

“Gee!” I said. Father looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I knew then that he had known all along that I was listening.

I flushed but stood my ground, knowing I was being granted admission to adult affairs, if only by the back door.

The girl in the picture was lovely. She couldn’t have been many years older than I and she was twice as pretty. She had short dark hair curled all over her head and apparently that poreless creamy skin that seems to have an inner light of itself. She had a tentative look about her as though her dark eyebrows were horizontal question marks. There was a droop to the corners of her mouth—not much, just enough to make you wonder why… and want to comfort her.

“She’ll stir the Canyon for sure,” said Father.

“I don’t know,” Mother frowned thoughtfully. “What will the Old Ones say to a marriageable Outsider in the Canyon?”

“Adonday Veeah!” muttered Father. “That never occurred to me. None of our other teachers were ever of an age to worry about.”

“What would happen?” I asked. “I mean if one of The Group married an Outsider?”

“Impossible,” said Father, so like the Old Ones that I could see why his name was approved in Meeting last Spring.

“Why, there’s even our Jemmy,” worried Mother. “Already he’s saying he’ll have to start trying to find another Group. None of the girls here please him. Supposing this Outsider—how old is she?”

Father unfolded the application. “Twenty-three,” he said, “Just three years out of college.”

“Jemmy’s twenty-four,” said Mother, pinching her mouth together. “Father, I’m afraid you’ll have to cancel the contract. If anything happened— Well, you waited over-long to become an Old One to my way of thinking and it’d be a shame to have something go wrong your first year.”

“I can’t cancel the contract. She’s on her way here. School starts next Monday.” Father ruffled his hair forward as he does when he’s disturbed. “We’re probably making a something of a nothing,” he said hopefully.

“Well I only hope we don’t have any trouble with this Outsider.”

“Or she with us,” grinned Father. “Where are my cigarettes?”

“On the book case,” said Mother, getting up and folding the table cloth together to hold the crumbs.

Father snapped his fingers and the cigarettes drifted in from the front room.

Mother went on out to the kitchen. The table cloth shook itself over the waste basket and then followed her.

Father drove to Kerry Canyon Sunday night to pick up our new teacher. She was supposed to have arrived Saturday afternoon, but she didn’t make bus connections at the County Seat. The road ends at Kerry Canyon. I mean for Outsiders. There’s not much of the look of a well-traveled road very far out our way from Kerry Canyon, which is just as well. Tourists leave us alone. Of course we don’t have much trouble getting our cars to and fro but that’s why everything dead-ends at Kerry Canyon and we have to do all our own fetching and carrying—I mean the road being in the condition it is.

All the kids at our house wanted to stay up to see the new teacher, so Mother let them; but by 7:30 the youngest ones began to drop off and by 9 there was only Jethro and ’Kiah, Lizbeth and Jemmy and me. Father should have been home long before and Mother was restless and uneasy. I knew if he didn’t arrive soon, she would head for her room and the cedar box under the bed. But at 9:15 we heard the car coughing and sneezing up the draw. Mother’s wide relieved smile was reflected on all our faces.

“Of course!” she cried. “I forgot. He has an Outsider in the car. He had to use the road and it’s terrible across Jackass Flat.”

I felt Miss Carmody before she came in the door. I was tingling all over from anticipation already, but all at once I felt her, so plainly that I knew with a feeling of fear and pride that I was of my Grandmother, that soon I would be bearing the burden and blessing of her Gift: the Gift that develops into free access to any mind—one of The People or Outsider—willing or not. And besides the access, the ability to counsel and help, to straighten tangled minds and snarled emotions.

And then Miss Carmody stood in the doorway, blinking a little against the light, muffled to the chin against the brisk fall air. A bright scarf hid her hair but her skin was that luminous matte-cream it had looked. She was smiling a little, but scared, too. I shut my eyes and… I went in—just like that. It was the first time I had ever sorted anybody. She was all fluttery with tiredness and strangeness and there was a question deep inside her that had the wornness of repetition, but I couldn’t catch what it was. And under the uncertainty there was a sweetness and dearness and such a bewildered sorrow that I felt my eyes dampen. Then I looked at her again (sorting takes such a little time) as Father introduced her. I heard a gasp beside me and suddenly I went into Jemmy’s mind with a stunning rush.

Jemmy and I have been close all our lives and we don’t always need words to talk with one another, but this was the first time I had ever gone in like this and I knew he didn’t know what had happened. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to know his emotion so starkly. I closed him out as quickly as possible, but not before I knew that now Jemmy would never hunt for another Group; Old Ones or no Old Ones, he had found his love.

All this took less time than it takes to say “How do you do?” and shake hands. Mother descended with cries and drew Miss Carmody and Father out to the kitchen for coffee and Jemmy swatted Jethro and made him carry the luggage instead of snapping it to Miss Carmody’s room. After all, we didn’t want to lose our teacher before she even saw the school house.

I waited until everyone was bedded down. Miss Carmody in her cold, cold bed, the rest of us of course with our sheets set for warmth—how I pity Outsiders! Then I went to Mother.

She met me in the dark hall and we clung together as she comforted me.

“Oh Mother,” I whispered. “I sorted Miss Carmody tonight. I’m afraid.”

Mother held me tight again. “I wondered,” she said. “It’s a great responsibility. You have to be so wise and clear-thinking. Your Grandmother carried the Gift with graciousness and honor. You are of her. You can do it.”

“But Mother! To be an Old One!”

Mother laughed. “You have years of training ahead of you before you’ll be an Old One. Counselor to the soul is a weighty job.”

“Do I have to tell?” I pleaded. “I don’t want anyone to know yet. I don’t want to be set apart.”

“I’ll tell the Oldest,” she said. “No one else need know.” She hugged me again and I went back, comforted, to bed.

I lay in the darkness and let my mind clear, not even knowing how I knew how to. Like the gentle reachings of quiet fingers I felt the family about me. I felt warm and comfortable as though I were cupped in the hollow palm of a loving hand. Some day I would belong to The Group as I now belonged to the family. Belong to others? With an odd feeling of panic, I shut the family out. I wanted to be alone—to belong just to me and no one else. I didn’t want the Gift.

I slept after a while.

Miss Carmody left for the school house an hour before we did. She wanted to get things started a little before school time, her late arrival making it kind of rough on her. ’Kiah, Jethro, Lizbeth and I walked down the lane to the Armisters’ to pick up their three kids. The sky was so blue you could taste it, a winey, fallish taste of harvest fields and falling leaves. We were all feeling full of bubbly enthusiasm for the beginning of school. We were light-hearted and light-footed, too, as we kicked along through the cottonwood leaves paving the lane with gold. In fact Jethro felt too light-footed and the third time I hauled him down and made him walk on the ground, I cuffed him good. He was still sniffling when we got to Armisters’.

“She’s pretty!” called Lizbeth before the kids got out to the gate, all agog and eager for news of the new teacher.

“She’s young,” added ’Kiah, elbowing himself ahead of Lizbeth.

“She’s littler’n me,” sniffed Jethro and we all laughed because he’s five-six already even if he isn’t twelve yet.

Debra and Rachel Armister linked arms with Lizbeth and scuffled down the lane, heads together, absorbing the details of teacher’s hair, dress, nail polish, luggage and night clothes, though goodness knows how Lizbeth knew anything about that.

Jethro and ’Kiah annexed Jeddy and they climbed up on the rail fence that parallels the lane and walked the top rail. Jethro took a tentative step or two above the rail, caught my eye and stepped back in a hurry. He knows as well as any child in the Canyon that a kid his age has no business lifting along a public road.

We detoured at the Mesa Road to pick up the Kroginold boys. More than once Father has sighed over the Kroginolds.

You see, when The Crossing was made, The People got separated in that last wild moment when air was screaming past and the heat was building up so alarmingly. The members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind Old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After The People gathered themselves together from the Life Slips and founded Cougar Canyon, they found that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there’s something complicated about marketing the stuff. It has to be shipped out of the country and shipped in again because everyone knows that it doesn’t occur in this region.

Anyway, our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of The People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us. Grandmother in her time sensed two Groups but could never locate them exactly and, since our object is to go unnoticed in this new life, no real effort has ever been made to find them. Father can remember just a little of The Crossing, but some of the Old Ones are blind and crippled from the heat and the terrible effort they put forth to save the others from burning up like falling stars.

But getting back, Father often said that of all The People who could have made up our Group, we had to get the Kroginolds. They’re rebels and were even before The Crossing. It’s their kids that have been so rough on our teachers. The rest of us usually behave fairly decently and remember that we have to be careful around Outsiders.

Derek and Jake Kroginold were wrestling in a pile of leaves by the front gate when we got there. They didn’t even hear us coming, so I leaned over and whacked the nearest rear-end and they turned in a flurry of leaves and grinned up at me for all the world like pictures of Pan[12] in the mythology book at home.

“What kinda old bat we got this time?” asked Derek as he scrabbled in the leaves for his lunch box.

“She’s not an old bat,” I retorted, madder than need be because Derek annoys me so. “She’s young and beautiful.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet!” Jake emptied the leaves from his cap onto the trio of squealing girls.

“She is so!” retorted ’Kiah. “The nicest teacher we ever had.”

“She won’t teach me nothing!” yelled Derek, lifting to the top of the cottonwood tree at the turn-off.

“Well, if she won’t, I will,” I muttered and, reaching for a handful of sun, I platted the twishers so quickly that Derek fell like a rock. He yelled like a catamount, thinking he’d get killed for sure, but I stopped him about a foot from the ground and then let go. Well, the stopping and the thump to the ground pretty well jarred the wind out of him, but he yelled:

“I’ll tell the Old Ones! You ain’t supposed to platt twishers—!”

“Tell the Old Ones,” I snapped, kicking on down the leafy road. “I’ll be there and tell them why. And then, old smarty pants, what will be your excuse for lifting?”

And then I was ashamed. I was showing off as bad as a Kroginold—but they make me so mad!

Our last stop before school was at the Clarinades’. My heart always squeezed when I thought of the Clarinade twins. They just started school this year—two years behind the average Canyon kid. Mrs. Kroginold used to say that the two of them, Susie and Jerry, divided one brain between them before they were born. That’s unkind and untrue—thoroughly a Kroginold remark—but it is true that by Canyon standards the twins were retarded. They lacked so many of the attributes of The People. Father said it might be a delayed effect of The Crossing that they would grow out of, or it might be advance notice of what our children will be like here—what is ahead for The People. It makes me shiver, wondering.

Susie and Jerry were waiting, clinging to one another’s hand as they always were. They were shy and withdrawn, but both were radiant because of starting school. Jerry, who did almost all the talking for the two of them, answered our greetings with a shy “Hello.”

Then Susie surprised us all by exclaiming, “We’re going to school!”

“Isn’t it wonderful?” I replied, gathering her cold little hand into mine. “And you’re going to have the prettiest teacher we ever had.”

But Susie had retired into blushing confusion and didn’t say another word all the way to school.

I was worried about Jake and Derek. They were walking apart from us, whispering, looking over at us and laughing. They were cooking up some kind of mischief for Miss Carmody. And more than anything I wanted her to stay. I found right then that there would be years ahead of me before I became an Old One. I tried to go in to Derek and Jake to find out what was cooking, but try as I might I couldn’t get past the sibilance of their snickers and the hard, flat brightness of their eyes.

We were turning off the road into the school yard when Jemmy, who should have been up at the mine long since, suddenly stepped out of the bushes in front of us, his hands behind him. He glared at Jake and Derek and then at the rest of the children.

“You kids mind your manners when you get to school,” he snapped, scowling. “And you Kroginolds—just try anything funny and I’ll lift you to Old Baldy and platt the twishers on you. This is one teacher we’re going to keep.”

Susie and Jerry clung together in speechless terror. The Kroginolds turned red and pushed out belligerent jaws. The rest of us just stared at a Jemmy who never raised his voice and never pushed his weight around.

“I mean it, Jake and Derek. You try getting out of line and the Old Ones will find a few answers they’ve been looking for—especially about the belfry in Kerry Canyon.”

The Kroginolds exchanged looks of dismay and the girls sucked in breaths of astonishment. One of the most rigorously enforced rules of The Group concerns showing off outside the community. If Derek and Jake had been involved in ringing that bell all night last Fourth of July… well!

“Now you kids, scoot!” Jemmy jerked his head toward the school house and the terrified twins scudded down the leaf-strewn path like a pair of bright leaves themselves, followed by the rest of the children with the Kroginolds looking sullenly back over their shoulders and muttering.

Jemmy ducked his head and scowled. “It’s time they got civilized anyway. There’s no sense to our losing teachers all the time.”

“No,” I said noncommittally.

“There’s no point in scaring her to death.” Jemmy was intent on the leaves he was kicking with one foot.

“No,” I agreed, suppressing my smile.

Then Jemmy smiled ruefully in amusement at himself. “I should waste words with you,” he said. “Here.” He took his hands from behind him and thrust a bouquet of burning bright autumn leaves into my arms. “They’re from you to her,” he said. “Something pretty for the first day.”

“Oh, Jemmy!” I cried through the scarlet and crimson and gold. “They’re beautiful. You’ve been up on Baldy this morning.”

“That’s right,” he said. “But she won’t know where they came from.” And he was gone.

I hurried to catch up with the children before they got to the door. Suddenly overcome with shyness, they were milling around the porch steps, each trying to hide behind the others.

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes!” I whispered to our kids. “You ate breakfast with her this morning. She won’t bite. Go on in.”

But I found myself shouldered to the front and leading the subdued group into the school room. While I was giving the bouquet of leaves to Miss Carmody, the others with the ease of established habit slid into their usual seats, leaving only the twins, stricken and white, standing alone.

Miss Carmody, dropping the leaves on her desk, knelt quickly beside them, pried a hand of each gently free from their frenzied clutching and held them in hers.

“I’m so glad you came to school,” she said in her warm, rich voice. “I need a first grade to make the school work out right and I have a seat that must have been built on purpose for twins.”

And she led them over to the side of the room, close enough to the old pot-bellied stove for Outside comfort later and near enough to the window to see out. There, in dusted glory, stood one of the old double desks that The Group must have inherited from some ghost town out in the hills. There were two wooden boxes for footstools for small dangling feet and, spouting like a flame from the old ink well hole, a spray of vivid red leaves—matchmates to those Jemmy had given me.

The twins slid into the desk, never loosing hands, and stared up at Miss Carmody, wide-eyed. She smiled back at them and, leaning forward, poked her finger tip into the deep dimple in each round chin.

“Buried smiles,” she said, and the two scared faces lighted up briefly with wavery smiles. Then Miss Carmody turned to the rest of us.

I never did hear her introductory words. I was too busy mulling over the spray of leaves, and how she came to know the identical routine, words and all, that the twins’ mother used to make them smile, and how on earth she knew about the old desks in the shed. But by the time we rose to salute the flag and sing our morning song, I had it figured out. Father must have briefed her on the way home last night. The twins were an ever present concern of the whole Group and we were all especially anxious to have their first year a successful one. Also, Father knew the smile routine and where the old desks were stored. As for the spray of leaves, well, some did grow this low on the mountain and frost is tricky at leaf-turning time.

So school was launched and went along smoothly. Miss Carmody was a good teacher and even the Kroginolds found their studies interesting.

They hadn’t tried any tricks since Jemmy threatened them. That is, except that silly deal with the chalk. Miss Carmody was explaining something on the board and was groping sideways for the chalk to add to the lesson. Jake was deliberately lifting the chalk every time she almost had it. I was just ready to do something about it when Miss Carmody snapped her fingers with annoyance and grasped the chalk firmly. Jake caught my eye about then and shrank about six inches in girth and height. I didn’t tell Jemmy, but Jake’s fear that I might kept him straight for a long time.

The twins were really blossoming. They laughed and played with the rest of the kids and Jerry even went off occasionally with the other boys at noon time, coming back as disheveled and wet as the others after a dam-building session in the creek.

Miss Carmody fitted so well into the community and was so well-liked by us kids that it began to look like we’d finally keep a teacher all year. Already she had withstood some of the shocks that had sent our other teachers screaming. For instance….

The first time Susie got a robin redbreast sticker on her bookmark for reading a whole page—six lines—perfectly, she lifted all the way back to her seat, literally walking about four inches in the air. I held my breath until she sat down and was caressing the glossy sticker with one finger, then I sneaked a cautious look at Miss Carmody. She was sitting very erect, her hands clutching both ends of her desk as though in the act of rising, a look of incredulous surprise on her face. Then she relaxed, shook her head and smiled, and busied herself with some papers.

I let my breath out cautiously. The last teacher but two went into hysterics when one of the girls absent-mindedly lifted back to her seat because her sore foot hurt. I had hoped Miss Carmody was tougher—and apparently she was.

That same week, one noon hour, Jethro came pelting up to the school house where Valancy—that’s her first name and I call her by it when we are alone, after all she’s only four years older than I—was helping me with that gruesome Tests and Measurements I was taking by extension from Teachers’ College.

“Hey Karen!” he yelled through the window. “Can you come out a minute?”

“Why?” I yelled back, annoyed at the interruption just when I was trying to figure what was normal about a normal grade curve.

“There’s need,” yelled Jethro.

I put down my book. “I’m sorry, Valancy. I’ll go see what’s eating him.”

“Should I come too?” she asked. “If something’s wrong—”

“It’s probably just some silly thing,” I said, edging out fast. When one of The People says “There’s need,” that means Group business.

“Adonday Veeah!” I muttered at Jethro as we rattled down the steep rocky path to the creek. “What are you trying to do? Get us all in trouble? What’s the matter?”

“Look,” said Jethro, and there were the boys standing around an alarmed but proud Jerry and above their heads, poised in the air over a half-built rock dam, was a huge boulder.

“Who lifted that?” I gasped.

“I did,” volunteered Jerry, blushing crimson.

I turned on Jethro. “Well, why didn’t you platt the twishers on it? You didn’t have to come running—”

“On that?” Jethro squeaked. “You know very well we’re not allowed to lift anything that big let alone platt it. Besides,” shamefaced, “I can’t remember that dern girl stuff.”

“Oh Jethro! You’re so stupid sometimes!” I turned to Jerry. “How on earth did you ever lift anything that big?”

He squirmed. “I watched Daddy at the mine once.”

“Does he let you lift at home?” I asked severely.

“I don’t know.” Jerry squashed mud with one shoe, hanging his head. “I never lifted anything before.”

“Well, you know better. You kids aren’t allowed to lift anything an Outsider your age can’t handle alone. And not even that if you can’t platt it afterwards.”

“I know it.” Jerry was still torn between embarrassment and pride.

“Well, remember it,” I said. And taking a handful of sun, I platted the twishers and set the boulder back on the hillside where it belonged.

Platting does come easier to the girls—sunshine platting, that is. Of course only the Old Ones do the sun-and-rain one and only the very Oldest of them all would dare the moonlight-and-dark, that can move mountains. But that was still no excuse for Jethro to forget and run the risk of having Valancy see what she mustn’t see.

It wasn’t until I was almost back to the school house that it dawned on me. Jerry had lifted! Kids his age usually lift play stuff almost from the time they walk. That doesn’t need platting because it’s just a matter of a few inches and a few seconds so gravity manages the return. But Jerry and Susie never had. They were finally beginning to catch up. Maybe it was just The Crossing that slowed them down—and maybe only the Clarinades. In my delight, I forgot and lifted to the school porch without benefit of the steps. But Valancy was putting up pictures on the high, old-fashioned moulding just below the ceiling, so no harm was done. She was flushed from her efforts and asked me to bring the step stool so she could finish them. I brought it and steadied it for her—and then nearly let her fall as I stared. How had she hung those first four pictures before I got there?

The weather was unnaturally dry all Fall. We didn’t mind it much because rain with an Outsider around is awfully messy. We have to let ourselves get wet. But when November came and went and Christmas was almost upon us, and there was practically no rain and no snow at all, we all began to get worried. The creek dropped to a trickle and then to scattered puddles and then went dry. Finally the Old Ones had to spend an evening at the Group Reservoir doing something about our dwindling water supply. They wanted to get rid of Valancy for the evening, just in case, so Jemmy volunteered to take her to Kerry to the show. I was still awake when they got home long after midnight. Since I began to develop the Gift, I have long periods of restlessness when it seems I have no apartness but am of every person in The Group. The training I should start soon will help me shut out the others except when I want them. The only thing is that we don’t know who is to train me. Since Grandmother died there has been no Sorter in our Group and because of The Crossing, we have no books or records to help.

Anyway, I was awake and leaning on my window sill in the darkness. They stopped on the porch—Jemmy is bunking at the mine during his stint there. I didn’t have to guess or use a Gift to read the pantomime before me. I closed my eyes and my mind as their shadows merged. Under their strong emotion, I could have had free access to their minds, but I had been watching them all Fall. I knew in a special way what passed between them, and I knew that Valancy often went to bed in tears and that Jemmy spent too many lonely hours on the Crag that juts out over the canyon from high on Old Baldy, as though he were trying to make his heart as inaccessible to Outsiders as the Crag is. I knew what he felt, but oddly enough I had never been able to sort Valancy since that first night. There was something very un-Outsiderish and also very un-Groupish about her mind and I couldn’t figure what.

I heard the front door open and close and Valancy’s light steps fading down the hall and then I felt Jemmy calling me outside. I put my coat on over my robe and shivered down the hall. He was waiting by the porch steps, his face still and unhappy in the faint moonlight.

“She won’t have me,” he said flatly.

“Oh, Jemmy!” I cried. “You asked her—”

“Yes,” he said. “She said no.”

“I’m so sorry.” I huddled down on the top step to cover my cold ankles. “But Jemmy—”

“Yes, I know!” He retorted savagely. “She’s an Outsider. I have no business even to want her. Well, if she’d have me, I wouldn’t hesitate a minute. This Purity-of-the-Group deal is—”

“… is fine and right,” I said softly, “as long as it doesn’t touch you personally? But think for a minute, Jemmy. Would you be able to live a life as an Outsider? Just think of the million and one restraints that you would have to impose on yourself—and for the rest of your life, too, or lose her after all. Maybe it’s better to accept No now than to try to build something and ruin it completely later. And if there should be children…” I paused. “Could there be children, Jemmy?”

I heard him draw a sharp breath.

“We don’t know,” I went on. “We haven’t had the occasion to find out. Do you want Valancy to be part of the first experiment?”

Jemmy slapped his hat viciously down on his thigh, then he laughed.

“You have the Gift,” he said, though I had never told him. “Have you any idea, sister mine, how little you will be liked when you become an Old One?”

“Grandmother was well-liked,” I answered placidly. Then I cried, “Don’t you set me apart, darn you, Jemmy. Isn’t it enough to know that among a different people, I am different? Don’t you desert me now!” I was almost in tears.

Jemmy dropped to the step beside me and thumped my shoulder in his old way. “Pull up your socks, Karen. We have to do what we have to do. I was just taking my mad out on you. What a world.” He sighed heavily.

I huddled deeper in my coat, cold of soul.

“But the other one is gone,” I whispered. “The Home.”

And we sat there sharing the poignant sorrow that is a constant undercurrent among The People, even those of us who never actually saw The Home. Father says it’s because of a sort of racial memory.

“But she didn’t say no because she doesn’t love me,” Jemmy went on at last. “She does love me. She told me so.”

“Then why not?” Sister-wise I couldn’t imagine anyone turning Jemmy down.

Jemmy laughed—a short, unhappy laugh. “Because she is different.”

“She’s different?”

“That’s what she said, as though it was pulled out of her. ‘I can’t marry,’ she said. ‘I’m different!’ That’s pretty good, isn’t it, coming from an Outsider!”

“She doesn’t know we’re The People,” I said. “She must feel that she is different from everyone. I wonder why?”

“I don’t know. There’s something about her, though. A kind of shield or wall that keeps us apart. I’ve never met anything like it in an Outsider or in one of The People either. Sometimes it’s like meshing with one of us and then bang! I smash the daylights out of me against that stone wall.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve felt it, too.”

We listened to the silent past-midnight world and then Jemmy stood.

“Well, g’night, Karen. Be seeing you.”

I stood up, too. “Good night, Jemmy.” I watched him start off in the late moonlight. He turned at the gate, his face hidden in the shadows.

“But I’m not giving up,” he said quietly. “Valancy is my love.”

The next day was hushed and warm—unnaturally so for December in our hills. There was a kind of ominous stillness among the trees, and, threading thinly against the milky sky, the thin smokes of little brush fires pointed out the dryness of the whole country. If you looked closely you could see piling behind Old Baldy an odd bank of clouds, so nearly the color of the sky that it was hardly discernable, but puffy and summer-thunderheady.

All of us were restless in school, the kids reacting to the weather, Valancy pale and unhappy after last night. I was bruising my mind against the blank wall in hers, trying to find some way I could help her.

Finally the thousand and one little annoyances were climaxed by Jerry and Susie scuffling until Susie was pushed out of the desk onto an open box of wet water colors that Debra for heaven only knows what reason had left on the floor by her desk. Susie shrieked and Debra sputtered and Jerry started a high silly giggle of embarrassment and delight. Valancy, without looking, reached for something to rap for order with and knocked down the old cracked vase full of drooping wildflowers and three-day-old water. The vase broke and flooded her desk with the foul-smelling deluge, ruining the monthly report she had almost ready to send in to the County School Superintendent.

For a stricken moment there wasn’t a sound in the room, then Valancy burst into half-hysterical laughter and the whole room rocked with her. We all rallied around doing what we could to clean up Susie and Valancy’s desk and then Valancy declared a holiday and decided that it would be the perfect time to go up-canyon to the slopes of Baldy and gather what greenery we could find to decorate our school room for the holidays.

We all take our lunches to school, so we gathered them up and took along a square tarp the boys had brought to help build the dam in the creek. Now that the creek was dry, they couldn’t use it and it’d come in handy to sit on at lunch time and would serve to carry our greenery home in, too, stretcher-fashion.

Released from the school room, we were all loud and jubilant and I nearly kinked my neck trying to keep all the kids in sight at once to nip in the bud any thoughtless lifting or other Group activity. The kids were all so wild, they might forget.

We went on up-canyon past the kids’ dam and climbed the bare, dry waterfalls that stair-step up to the Mesa. On the Mesa, we spread the tarp and pooled our lunches to make it more picnicky. A sudden hush from across the tarp caught my attention. Debra, Rachel and Lizbeth were staring horrified at Susie’s lunch. She was calmly dumping out a half dozen koomatka beside her sandwiches.

Koomatka are almost the only plants that lasted through The Crossing. I think four koomatka survived in someone’s personal effects. They were planted and cared for as tenderly as babies and now every household in The Group has a koomatka plant growing in some quiet spot out of casual sight. Their fruit is eaten not so much for nourishment as Earth knows nourishment, but as a last remembrance of all other similar delights that died with The Home. We always save koomatka for special occasions. Susie must have sneaked some out when her mother wasn’t looking. And there they were—across the table from an Outsider!

Before I could snap them to me or say anything, Valancy turned, too, and caught sight of the softly glowing bluey-green pile. Her eyes widened and one hand went out. She started to say something and then she dropped her eyes quickly and drew her hand back. She clasped her hands tightly together and the girls, eyes intent on her, scrambled the koomatka back into the sack and Lizbeth silently comforted Susie who had just realized what she had done. She was on the verge of tears at having betrayed The People to an Outsider.

Just then ’Kiah and Derek rolled across the picnic table fighting over a cupcake. By the time we salvaged our lunch from under them and they had scraped the last of the chocolate frosting off their T-shirts, the koomatka incident seemed closed. And yet, as we lay back resting a little to settle our stomachs, staring up at the smothery low-hanging clouds that had grown from the milky morning sky, I suddenly found myself trying to decide about ­Valancy’s look when she saw the fruit. Surely it couldn’t have been recognition!

At the end of our brief siesta, we carefully buried the remains of our lunch—the hill was much too dry to think of burning it—and started on again. After a while, the slope got steeper and the stubborn tangle of manzanita tore at our clothes and scratched our legs and grabbed at the rolled-up tarp until we all looked longingly at the free air above it. If Valancy hadn’t been with us we could have lifted over the worst and saved all this trouble. But we blew and panted for a while and then struggled on.

After an hour or so, we worked out onto a rocky knoll that leaned against the slope of Baldy and made a tiny island in the sea of manzanita. We all stretched out gratefully on the crumbling granite outcropping, listening to our heart-beats slowing.

Then Jethro sat up and sniffed. Valancy and I alerted. A sudden puff of wind from the little side canyon brought the acrid pungency of burning brush to us. Jethro scrambled along the narrow ridge to the slope of Baldy and worked his way around out of sight into the canyon. He came scrambling back, half lifting, half running.

“Awful!” he panted. “It’s awful! The whole canyon ahead is on fire and it’s coming this way fast!”

Valancy gathered us together with a glance.

“Why didn’t we see the smoke?” she asked tensely. “There wasn’t any smoke when we left the school house.”

“Can’t see this slope from school,” he said. “Fire could burn over a dozen slopes and we’d hardly see the smoke. This side of Baldy is a rim fencing in an awful mess of canyons.”

“What’ll we do?” quavered Lizbeth, hugging Susie to her.

Another gust of wind and smoke set us all to coughing and through my streaming tears, I saw a long lapping tongue of fire reach around the canyon wall.

Valancy and I looked at each other. I couldn’t sort her mind, but mine was a panic, beating itself against the fire and then against the terrible tangle of manzanita all around us. Bruising against the possibility of lifting out of danger, then against the fact that none of the kids was capable of sustained progressive self-lifting for more than a minute or so and how could we leave Valancy? I hid my face in my hands to shut out the acres and acres of tinder-dry manzanita that would blaze like a torch at the first touch of fire. If only it would rain! You can’t set fire to wet manzanita, but after these long months of drought—!

I heard the younger children scream and looked up to see Valancy staring at me with an intensity that frightened me even as I saw fire standing bright and terrible behind her at the mouth of the canyon.

Jake, yelling hoarsely, broke from the group and lifted a yard or two over the manzanita before he tangled his feet and fell helpless into the ugly, angled branches.

“Get under the tarp!” Valancy’s voice was a whip-lash. “All of you get under the tarp!”

“It won’t do any good,” bellowed ’Kiah. “It’ll burn like paper!”

“Get—under—the—tarp!” Valancy’s spaced, icy words drove us to unfolding the tarp and spreading it to creep under. I lifted (hoping even at this awful moment that Valancy wouldn’t see me) over to Jake and yanked him back to his feet. I couldn’t lift with him so I pushed and prodded and half-carried him back through the heavy surge of black smoke to the tarp and shoved him under. Valancy was standing, back to the fire, so changed and alien that I shut my eyes against her and started to crawl in with the other kids.

And then she began to speak. The rolling, terrible thunder of her voice shook my bones and I swallowed a scream. A surge of fear swept through our huddled group and shoved me back out from under the tarp.

Till I die, I’ll never forget Valancy standing there tense and taller than life against the rolling convulsive clouds of smoke, both her hands outstretched, fingers wide apart as the measured terror of her voice went on and on in words that plague me because I should have known them and didn’t. As I watched, I felt an icy cold gather, a paralyzing, unearthly cold that froze the tears on my tensely upturned face.

And then lightning leaped from finger to finger of her lifted hands. And lightning answered in the clouds above her. With a toss of her hands she threw the cold, the lightning, the sullen shifting smoke upward, and the roar of the racing fire was drowned in a hissing roar of down-drenching rain.

I knelt there in the deluge, looking for an eternal second into her drained, despairing, hopeless eyes before I caught her just in time to keep her head from banging on the granite as she pitched forward, inert.

Then as I sat there cradling her head in my lap, shaking with cold and fear, with the terrified wailing of the kids behind me, I heard Father shout and saw him and Jemmy and Darcy Clarinade in the old pick-up, lifting over the steaming streaming manzanita, over the trackless mountain side through the rain to us. Father lowered the truck until one of the wheels brushed a branch and spun lazily, then the three of them lifted all of us up to the dear familiarity of that beat-up old jalopy.

Jemmy received Valancy’s limp body into his arms and crouched in back, huddling her in his arms, for the moment hostile to the whole world that had brought his love to such a pass.

We kids clung to Father in an esctasy of relief. He hugged us all tight to him, then he raised my face.

“Why did it rain?” he asked sternly, every inch an Old One while the cold downpour dripped off the ends of my hair and he stood dry inside his Shield.

“I don’t know,” I sobbed, blinking my streaming eyes against his sternness. “Valancy did it… with lightning… it was cold… she talked….” Then I broke down completely, plumping down on the rough floor boards and, in spite of my age, howling right along with the other kids.

It was a silent, solemn group that gathered in the school house that evening. I sat at my desk with my hands folded stiffly in front of me, half scared of my own People. This was the first official meeting of the Old Ones I’d ever attended. They all sat in desks, too, except the Oldest who sat in Valancy’s chair. Valancy sat stony-faced in the twin’s desk, but her nervous fingers shredded one kleenex after another as she waited.

The Oldest rapped the side of the desk with his cane and turned his sightless eyes from one to another of us.

“We’re all here,” he said, “to inquire——”

“Oh, stop it!” Valancy jumped up from her seat. “Can’t you fire me without all this rigmarole? I’m used to it. Just say go and I’ll go!” She stood trembling.

“Sit down, Miss Carmody,” said the Oldest. And Valancy sat down meekly.

“Where were you born?” asked the Oldest quietly.

“What does it matter?” flared Valancy. Then resignedly, “It’s in my application. Vista Mar, California.”

“And your parents?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a stir in the room.

“Why not?”

“Oh, this is so unnecessary!” cried Valancy. “But if you have to know, both my parents were foundlings. They were found wandering in the streets after a big explosion and fire in Vista Mar. An old couple who lost everything in the fire took them in. When they grew up, they married. I was born. They died. Can I go now?”

A murmur swept the room.

“Why did you leave your other jobs?” asked Father.

Before Valancy could answer, the door was flung open and Jemmy stalked defiantly in.

“Go!” said the Oldest.

“Please,” said Jemmy, deflating suddenly. “Let me stay. It concerns me too.”

The Oldest fingered his cane and then nodded. Jemmy half-smiled with relief and sat down in a back seat.

“Go on,” said the Oldest One to Valancy.

“All right then,” said Valancy. “I lost my first job because I—well—I guess you’d call it levitated—to fix a broken blind in my room. It was stuck and I just… went up… in the air until I unstuck it. The principal saw me. He couldn’t believe it and it scared him so he fired me.” She paused expectantly.

The Old Ones looked at one another and my silly, confused mind began to add up columns that only my lack of common sense had kept from giving totals long ago.

“And the other one?” The Oldest leaned his cheek on his doubled-up hand as he bent forward.

Valancy was taken aback and she flushed in confusion.

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I called my books to me—I mean they were on my desk….”

“We know what you mean,” said the Oldest.

“You know!” Valancy looked dazed.

The Oldest stood up.

“Valancy Carmody, open your mind!”

Valancy stared at him and then burst into tears.

“I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “It’s been too long. I can’t let anyone in. I’m different. I’m alone. Can’t you understand? They all died. I’m alien!”

“You are alien no longer,” said the Oldest. “You are home now, Valancy.” He motioned to me. “Karen, go in to her.”

So I did. At first the wall was still there; then with a soundless cry, half anguish and half joy, the wall went down and I was with Valancy. I saw all the secrets that had cankered in her since her parents died—the parents who were of The People.

They had been reared by the old couple who were not only of The People but had been the Oldest of the whole Crossing.

I tasted with her the hidden frightening things—the need for living as an Outsider, the terrible need for concealing all her differences and suppressing all the extra Gifts of The People, the ever present fear of betraying herself and the awful lostness that came when she thought she was the last of The People.

And then suddenly she came in to me and my mind was flooded with a far greater presence than I had ever before experienced.

My eyes flew open and I saw all of the Old Ones staring at Valancy. Even the Oldest had his face turned to her, wonder written as widely on his scarred face as on the others.

He bowed his head and made The Sign. “The lost persuasions and designs,” he murmured. “She has them all.”

And then I knew that Valancy, Valancy who had wrapped herself so tightly against the world to which any thoughtless act might betray her that she had lived with us all this time without our knowing about her or she about us, was one of us. Not only one of us but such a one as had not been since Grandmother died—and even beyond that. My incoherent thoughts cleared to one.

Now I would have some one to train me. Now I could become a Sorter—but only second to her.

I turned to share my wonder with Jemmy. He was looking at Valancy as The People must have looked at The Home in the last hour. Then he turned to the door.

Before I could draw a breath, Valancy was gone from me and from the Old Ones and Jemmy was turning to her outstretched hands.

Then I bolted for the outdoors and rushed like one possessed down the lane, lifting and running until I staggered up our porch steps and collapsed against Mother, who had heard me coming.

“Oh, Mother!” I cried. “She’s one of us! She’s Jemmy’s love! She’s wonderful!” And I burst into noisy sobs in the warm comfort of Mother’s arms.

So now I don’t have to go Outside to become a teacher. We have a permanent one. But I’m going anyway. I want to be as much like Valancy as I can and she has her degree. Besides I can use the discipline of living Outside for a year.

I have so much to learn and so much training to go through, but Valancy will always be there with me. I won’t be set apart alone because of the Gift.

Maybe I shouldn’t mention it, but one reason I want to hurry my training is that we’re going to try to locate the other People. None of the boys here please me.