Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “After all, I suppose castaways are always eager for rescue,” Obla said. Then, gently mocking, “I suppose you’re all packed?”

  “I’ve been packed almost since I was born. Haven’t I always been talking about getting out of this bind that holds us back?”

  “You have,” Obla thought. “Exhaustively talked about it. Put your hand out the window, Bram. Take a handful of sun.” I did, filling my palm with the tingling brightness. “Pour it out.” I tilted my hand and felt the warm flow of escaping light. “No more Earth sun ever again,” she said. “Not ever!”

  “Darn you, Obla, cut it out!” I cried.

  “You weren’t so entirely sure yourself, were you? Even after all your protestations. Even in spite of that big warm wonder growing inside you.”

  “Warm wonder?” Then I felt my face heat up. “Oh,” I said awkwardly. “That’s only natural interest in a stranger—a stranger from Home!” I felt excitement mounting. “Just think, Obla! From Home!”

  “A stranger from Home.” Obla’s thought was a little sad. “Listen to your words, Bram. A stranger from Home. Whenever have People been strangers to one another?”

  “You’re playing with words now. Let me tell you the whole thing—”

  I have used Obla for a sounding board ever since I can remember. I have no memory of her physically complete. I became conscious of her only after her disaster and mine. The same explosion that maimed her took my parents. They were trying to get some Outsiders out of a crashed plane and didn’t quite make it. Some of my most grandiose schemes have echoed hollow and empty against the listening receptiveness of Obla. And some of my shyest thoughts have grown to monumental strength with her uncritical acceptance of them. Somehow, when you hear your own ideas, crisply cut for transmission, they are stripped of anything extraneous and stand naked of pretensions, and then you can get a decent perspective on them.

  “Poor child,” she cut in when I told her of Salla’s hair being caught. “Poor child, to feel that pain is a privilege—”

  “Better that than having pain a way of life!” I flashed. “Who should know better than you?”

  “Perhaps, perhaps. Who is to say which is better—to hunger and be fed, or to be fed so continuously that you never know hunger? Sometimes a little fasting is good for the soul. Think of a cold drink of water after an afternoon in the hayfield.”

  I shivered at the delicious recollection. “Well, anyway...” and I finished the account for her. I was almost out of the door before I suddenly realized that I hadn’t mentioned Davy at all! I went back and told her. Before I was half through, her face twisted and her hair swirled protectively over it. When I finished I stood there awkwardly, not knowing exactly what to do. Then I caught a faint echo of her thought. “A voice again...” I think a little of my contempt for gadgets died at that moment. Anything that could pleasure Obla...

  ~ * ~

  I thought I was troubled about whether we should go or stay, until the afternoon I found all the Blends and In-gathereds sitting together on the boulders above Cougar Creek. Dita was trailing the water from her bare toes, and all the rest were concentrating on the falling of the drops as though there were some answer in them. The Francher kid was making a sharp crystal scale out of their falling. I came openly so there was no thought of eavesdropping, but I don’t think they were fully aware that I was there.

  “But for me—” Dita drew her knees up to her chest and clasped her wet feet in her hands, “for me it’s different. You’re Blends, or all of the People. But I’m all of Earth. My roots are anchored in this old rock. Think what it would mean to me to say good-by to my world. Think back to the Crossing—” A ripple of discomfort moved through the Group. “You see? And yet, to stay—to watch the People go, to know them gone—” She laid her cheek against her knees.

  The quick comfort of the others enveloped her, and Low moved to the boulder beside her.

  “It’d be as bad for us to leave,” he said. “Sure, we’re of the People, but this is the only Home we’ve known. I didn’t grow up in a Group. None of us did. All of our roots are firmly set here, too. To leave—”

  “What has the New Home to offer that we don’t have here?” Peter started a little whirlpool in the shallow stream below.

  “Well—” Low stilled the whirlpool and spoke into a lengthening silence, “ask Bram. He’s all afire to blast off.” He grinned over his shoulder at me.

  “The new Home is our world,” I said, drifting over to them, gathering my scattered thoughts. “We would be among our own. No more concealment. No more trying to fit in where we don’t fit. No more holding back, holding back, when we could be doing so much.”

  I could feel the surge and swirl of thoughts around me—each person aligning himself to the vision of the Home. Without any further word they all left the creek, absorbed in the problem. As they slowly scattered there was not an echo of a thought. Everyone was shutting himself up with his own reactions.

  ~ * ~

  All the peace and tranquillity of Cougar Canyon was gone. Oh, sure, the light still slanted brightly through the trees at dawn, the wind still stirred the branches in the hot quiet afternoons and occasionally whipped up little whirlwinds to dance the dried leaves in a brief flurry of action, and the slender new moon was cleanly bright in the evening sky—but it was all overlaid with a big question mark.

  I couldn’t settle to anything. Halfway through ripping a plank at the mill I’d think, “Why bother? We’ll be gone soon.” And then the spasm of acute pleasure and anticipation would somehow turn to the pain of bereavement and I’d feel like clutching a handful of sawdust and—well— sobbing into it.

  And late at night, changing the headgates to irrigate another alfalfa field, I’d kick the moss-slick wet boards and think exultantly, “When we get there we won’t have to go through this mumbo-jumbo. We’ll rain the water where and when we want it!”

  Then again, I’d lie in the edge of the hot sun, my head in the shade of the cottonwoods, and feel the deep soaking warmth to my very bone, smell the waiting dusty smell of the afternoon, feel sleep wrapping itself around my thoughts, and hear the sudden creaking cries of the red-winged blackbirds in the far fields, and suddenly know that I couldn’t leave it. Couldn’t give up Earth for any thing or any place.

  But there was Salla. Showing her Earth was like nothing you could ever imagine. For instance, it never occurred to her that things could hurt her. Like the day I found her halfway across Furnace Flat, huddled under a pinon pine, cradling her bare feet in her hands and rocking with pain.

  “Where are your shoes?” It was the first thing I could think of as I hunched beside her.

  “Shoes?” She caught the picture from me. “Oh, shoes. My—sandals—are at the ship. I wanted to feel this world. We shield so much at home that I couldn’t tell you a thing about textures there. But the sand was so good the first night, and water is wonderful, I thought this black glowing smoothness and splinteredness would be a different sort of texture.” She smiled ruefully. “It is. It’s hot and—and—”

  I supplied a word, “Hurty. I should think so. This shale flat heats up like a furnace this time of day. That’s why it’s called Furnace Flat.”

  “I landed in the middle of it, running. I was so surprised that I didn’t have sense enough to lift or shield.”

  “Let me see.” I loosened her fingers and took one of her slender white feet in my hand. “Adonday Veeah!” I whistled. Carefully I picked off a few loose flakes of bloodstained shale. “You’ve practically blistered your feet, too. Don’t you know the sun can be vicious this time of day?”

  “I know now.” She took her feet back and peered at the sole. “Look! There’s blood!”

  “Yep. That’s usual when you puncture your skin. Better come on back to the house and get those feet taken care of.”

  “Taken care of?”

  “Sure. Antiseptic for the germs, salve for the burns. You won’t go hunting for a day or two. Not with your fee
t, anyway.”

  “Can’t we just no-bi and transgraph? It’s so much simpler.”

  “Indubitably,” I said, lifting sitting as she did and straightening up in the air above the path. “If I knew what you were talking about.” We headed for the house.

  “Well, at Home the Healers—”

  “This is Earth,” I said. “We have no Healers as yet. Only in so far as our Sensitive can help out those who know about healing. It’s mostly a do-it-yourself deal with us. And who knows, you might be allergic to us and sprout day lilies at every puncture. It’ll probably worry your mother—”

  “Mother—” There was a curious pause. “Mother is annoyed with me already. She feels that I’m definitely undene. She wishes she’d left me Home. She’s afraid I’ll never be the same again.”

  “Undene?’’I asked, because Salla had sent out no clarification with the term.

  “Yes,” she said, and I caught at visualization until light finally began to dawn.

  “Well! We don’t exactly eat peas with our knives or wipe our noses on our sleeves! We can be pretty couth when we set our minds to it.”

  “I know, I know,” she hastened to say, “but Mother—well, you know some mothers.”

  “Yes, I know. But if you never walk or climb or swim or anything like that, what do you do for fun?”

  “It’s not that we never do them. But seldom casually and unthinkingly. We’re supposed to outgrow the need for childish activities like that. We’re supposed to be capable of more intellectual pleasures.”

  “Like what?” I held the branches aside for her to descend to the kitchen door, and nearly kinked my shoulder trying to do that and open the door for her simultaneously. After several false starts and stops and a feeling of utter foolishness, like the one you get when you try to dodge past a person who tries to dodge past you, we ended up at the kitchen table with Salla gasping at the smart of the Merthiolate. “Like what?” I repeated.

  “Hoosh! That’s quite a sensation.” She loosened her clutch on her ankles and relaxed under the soothing salve I spread on her reddened feet.

  “Well, Mother’s favorite—and she does it very well—is Anticipating. She likes roses.”

  “So do I,” I said, bewildered, “but I seldom Anticipate in connection with them.”

  Salla laughed. I liked to hear her laugh. It was more nearly a musical phrase than a laugh. The Francher kid, the first time he heard it, made a composition of it. Of course neither he nor I liked it very much when the other kids in the Canyon revved it up and used it for a dance tune, but I must admit it had quite a beat....Well, anyway, Salla laughed.

  “You know, for two people using the same words we certainly come out at different comprehensions. No—what Mother likes is Anticipating a rose. She chooses a bud that looks interesting—she knows all the finer distinctions—then she makes a rose, synthetic, as nearly like the real bud as she can. Then, for two or three days, she sees if she can anticipate every movement of the opening of the real rose by opening her synthetic simultaneously, or, if she’s very adept, just barely ahead of the other.” She laughed again. “It’s one of our family stories—the time she chose a bud that did nothing for two days, then shivered to dust. Somehow it had been sprayed with destro. Mother’s never quite got over the humiliation.”

  “Maybe I’m being undene,” I said, “but I can’t see spending two days watching a rose bud.”

  “And yet you spent a whole hour just looking at the sky last evening. And four of you spent hours last night receiving and displaying cards. You got quite emotional over it several times.”

  “Umm—well, yes. But that’s different. A sunset like that, and the way Jemmy plays—” I caught the teasing in her eyes and we laughed together. Laughter needs no interpreter, at least not our laughter.

  Salla took so much pleasure in sampling our world that, as is usual, I discovered things about our neighborhood I hadn’t known before. It was she who found the cave, because she was curious about the tiny trickle of water high on the slope of Baldy.

  “Just a spring,” I told her as we looked up at the dark streak that marked a fold in the massive cliff.

  “Just a spring, “ she mocked. “In this land of little water is there such a thing as just a spring?”

  “It’s not worth anything,” I protested, following her up into the air. “You can’t even drink from it.”

  “It could ease a heart hunger, though. The sight of wetness in an arid land.”

  “It can’t even splash,” I said as we neared the streak.

  “No,” Salla said, holding her forefinger to the end of the moisture. “But it can grow things.” Lightly she touched the minute green plants that clung to the rock wall and the dampness.

  “Pretty,” I said perfunctorily. “But look at the view from here.”

  We turned around, pressing our backs to the sheer cliff, and looked out over the vast stretches of red-to-purple-to-blue ranges of mountains, jutting fiercely naked or solidly forested or speckled with growth as far as we could see. And lazily, far away, a shaft of smelter smoke rose and bent almost at right angles as an upper current caught it and thinned it to haze. Below, fold after fold of the hills hugged protectively to themselves the tiny comings and goings and dwelling places of those who had lost themselves in the vastness.

  “And yet,” Salla almost whispered, “if you’re lost in vast enough vastness you find yourself—a different self, a self that has only Being and the Presence to contemplate.”

  “True,” I said, breathing deeply of sun and pine and hot granite. “But not many reach that vastness. Most of us size our little worlds to hold enough distractions to keep us from having to contemplate Being and God.”

  There was a moment’s deep silence as we let our own thoughts close the subject. Then Salla lifted and I started down.

  “Hey!” I called. “That’s up!”

  “I know it,” she called. “And that’s down! I still haven’t found the spring!”

  So I lifted, too, grumbling at the stubbornness of women, and arrived even with Salla just as she perched tentatively on a sharp spur of rock on the edge of the vegetation-covered gash that was the beginning of the oozing wetness. She looked straight down the dizzy thousands of feet below us.

  “What beautiful downness!” she said, pleasured.

  “If you were afraid of heights—”

  She looked at me quickly. “Are some people? Really?”

  “Some are. I read one, one time. Would you care to try the texture of that?” And I created for her the horrified frantic dying terror of an Outsider friend of mine who hardly dares look out of a second-story window.

  “Oh, no!” She paled and clung to the scanty draping of vines and branches of the cleft. “No more! No more!”

  “I’m sorry. But it is a different sort of emotion. I think of every time I read—’neither height nor depth nor any other creature.’ Height to my friend is a creature—a horrible hovering destroyer waiting to pounce on him.”

  “It’s too bad,” Salla said, “that he doesn’t remember to go on to the next phrase, and learn to lose his fear—”

  By quick common consent we switched subjects in midair.

  “This is the source,” I said. “Satisfied?”

  “No.” She groped among the vines. “I want to see a trickle trickle, and a drop drop from the beginning.” She burrowed deeper.

  Rolling my eyes to heaven for patience, I helped her hold back the vines. She reached for the next layer—and suddenly wasn’t there.

  “Salla!” I scrabbled at the vines. “Salla!”

  “H-h-here,” I caught her subvocal answer.

  “Talk!” I said as I felt her thought melt out of my consciousness.

  “I am talking!” Her reply broke to audibility on the last word. “And I’m sitting in some awfully cold wet water. Do come in.” I squirmed cautiously through the narrow cleft into the darkness and stumbled to my knees in icy water almost waist-deep.


  “It’s dark,” Salla whispered, and her voice ran huskily around the place.

  “Wait for your eyes to change,” I whispered back, and, groping through the water, caught her hand and clung to it. But even after a breathless sort of pause our eyes could not pick up enough light to see by—only faint green shimmer where the cleft was.

  “Had enough?” I asked. “Is this trickly and drippy enough?” I lifted our hands and the water sluiced off our elbows.

  “I want to see,” she protested.

  “Matches are inoperative when they’re wet. Flashlight have I none. Suggestions?”

  “Well, no. You don’t have any Glowers living here, do you?”

  “Since the word rings no bell, I guess not. But, say!” I dropped her hand and, rising to my knees, fumbled for my pocket. “Dita taught me— or tried to after Valancy told her how come—” I broke off, immersed in the problem of trying to get a hand into and out of the pocket of skintight wet Levi’s.