Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “I know I’m an Outlander,” Salla said plaintively, “but I thought I had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of your language.”

  “Dita’s the Outsider that we found with Low. She’s got some Designs and Persuasions none of us have. There!” I grunted, and settled back in the water. “Now if I can remember.”

  ~ * ~

  I held the thin dime between my fingers and shifted all those multiples of mental gears that are so complicated until you work your way through their complexity to the underlying simplicity. I concentrated my whole self on that little disc of metal. There was a sudden blinding spurt of light. Salla cried out, and I damped the light quickly to a more practical level.

  “I did it!” I cried. “I glowed it first thing, this time! It took me half an hour last time to get a spark!”

  Salla was looking in wonder at the tiny globe of brilliance in my hand. “And an Outsider can do that?”

  “Can do!” I said, suddenly very proud of our Outsiders. “And so can I, now! There you are, ma’am,” I twanged. “Yore light, yore cave— look to yore little heart’s content.”

  I don’t suppose it was much as caves go. The floor was sand, pale, granular, almost sugarlike. The pool—out of which we both dripped as soon as we sighted dry land—had no apparent source, but stayed always at the same level in spite of the slender flow that streaked the cliff. The roof was about twice my height and the pool was no farther than that across. The walls curved protectively close around the water. At first glance there was nothing special about the cave. There weren’t even any stalactites or stalagmites—just the sand and the quiet pool shimmering a little in the light of the glowed coin.

  “Well!” Salla sighed happily as she pushed back her heavy hair with wet hands. “This is where it begins.”

  “Yes.” I closed my hand around the dime and watched the light spray between my fingers. “Wetly, I might point out.”

  Salla was scrambling across the sand on all fours.

  “It’s high enough to stand,” I said, following her.

  “I’m being a cave creature,” she smiled back over her shoulder. “Not a human surveying a kingdom. It looks different from down here.”

  “Okay, troglodyte. How does it look down there?”

  “Marvelous!” Salla’s voice was very soft. “Bring the light and look!”

  We lay on our stomachs and peered into the tiny tunnel, hardly a foot across, that Salla had found. I focused the light down the narrow passageway. The whole thing was a lacy network of delicate crystals, white, clear, rosy and pale green, so fragile that I held my breath lest they break. The longer I looked the more wonder I saw—miniature forests and snowflakelike laciness, flights of fairy steps, castles and spires, flowers terraced up gentle hillsides, and branches of blossoms almost alive enough to sway. An arm’s length down the tunnel a quietly bright pool reflected the perfection around it to double the enchantment.

  Salla and I looked at each other, our faces so close together that we were mirrored in each other’s eyes—eyes that stated and reaffirmed: Ours— no one else in all the universe shares this spot with us.

  Wordlessly we sat back on the sand. I don’t know about Salla, but I was having a little difficulty with my breathing, because, for some odd reason, it seemed necessary to hold my breath to shield from being as easily read as a child.

  “Let’s leave the light,” Salla whispered. “It’ll stay lighted without you, won’t it?”

  “Yeah. Indefinitely.”

  “Leave it by the little cave. Then we’ll know it’s always lighted and lovely.”

  We edged our way out of the cleft in the cliff and hovered there for a minute, laughing at our bedraggled appearance. Then we headed for home and dry clothes.

  “I wish Obla could see the cave,” I said impulsively. Then wished I hadn’t because I caught Salla’s immediate displeased protest.

  “I mean,” I said awkwardly, “she never gets to see—” I broke off. After all, she wouldn’t be able to see any better if she were there. I would have to be her eyes.

  “Obla.” Salla wasn’t vocalizing now. “She’s very near to you.”

  “She’s almost my second self.”

  “A relative?”

  “No. Only as souls are related.”

  “I can feel her in your thoughts so often. And yet—have I ever met her?”

  “No. She doesn’t meet people.” I was holding in my mind the clean uncluttered strength of Obla; then again I caught Salla’s distressed protest and her feeling of being excluded, before she shielded. Still I hesitated. I didn’t want to share. Obla was more an expression of myself than a separate person. An expression that was hidden and precious. I was afraid to share—afraid that it might be like touching a finger to a fragile chemical fern in the little tunnel, that there wouldn’t even be a ping before the perfection shivered to a shapeless powder.

  ~ * ~

  Two weeks after the ship arrived, a general Group meeting was called. We all gathered on the flat around the ship. It looked like a field day at first, with the flat filled with laughing lifting children playing tag above the heads of the more sedate elders. The kids my age clustered at one side, tugged toward playing tag, too, but restrained because after all you do outgrow some things—when people are looking. I sat there with them, feeling an emptiness beside me. Salla was with her parents.

  The Oldest was not there. He was at home struggling to contain his being in the broken body that was becoming more and more a dissolving prison. So Jemmy called us to attention.

  “Long-drawn periods of indecision are not good,” he said without preliminary. “The ship has been here two weeks. We have all faced our problem—to go or to stay. There are many of us who have not yet come to a decision. This we must do soon. The ship will up a week from today. To help us decide we are now open to brief statements pro or con.”

  There was an odd tightening feeling as the whole Group flowed into a common thought stream and became a single unit instead of a mass of individuals.

  “I will go.” It was the thought of the Oldest from his bed back in the Canyon. “The new Home has the means to help me, so that the years yet allotted to me may be nearly painless. Since the Crossing—” He broke off, flashing an amused “ ‘Brief’!”

  “I will stay.” It was the voice of one of the young girls from Bendo. “We have only started to make Bendo a place fit to live in. I like beginnings. The new Home sounds finished, to me.”

  “I don’t want to go away,” a very young voice piped. “My radishes are just coming up and I hafta water them all the time. They’d die if I left.” Amusement rippled through the Group and relaxed us.

  “I’ll go.” It was Matt, called back from Tech by the ship’s arrival. “In the Home my field of specialization has developed far beyond what we have at Tech or anywhere else. But I’m coming back.”

  “There can be no free and easy passage back and forth between the Home and Earth,” Jemmy warned, “for a number of very valid reasons.”

  “I’ll chance it,” Matt said. “I’ll make it back.”

  “I’m staying,” the Francher kid said. “Here on Earth we’re different with a plus. There we’d be different with a minus. What we can do and do well won’t be special there. I don’t want to go where I’d be making ABC songs. I want my music to go on being big.”

  “I’m going,” Jake said, his voice mocking as usual. “I’m through horsing around. I’m going to become a solid citizen. But I want to go in for—” His verbalization stopped, and all I could comprehend was an angular sort of concept wound with time and space as with serpentine. I saw my own blankness on the faces around me and felt a little less stupid. “See,” Jake said. “That’s what I’ve been having on the tip of my mind for a long time. Shua tells me they’ve got a fair beginning on it there. I’ll be willing to ABC it for a while for a chance at something like that.”

  I cleared my throat. Here was my chance to broadcast to the whole Group what I in
tended to do! Apparently I was the only one seeing the situation clearly enough. “I—”

  It was as though I’d stepped into a dense fog bank. I felt as though I’d gone blind and dumb at one stroke. I had a feeling of being torn like a piece of paper. I lost all my breath as I became vividly conscious of my actual thoughts. I didn’t want to go! I was snatched into a mad whirlpool of thoughts at this realization. How could I stay after all I’d said? How could I go and know Earth no more? How could I stay and let Salla go? How could I go and leave Obla behind? Dimly I heard someone else’s voice finishing:

  “...because Home or no Home, this is Home to me!”

  I closed my gaping wordless mouth and wet my dry lips. I could see again—see the Group slowly dissolving—the Bendo Group gathering together under the trees, the rest drifting away from the flat. Low leaned across the rock. “S’matter, feller?” he laughed. “Cat got your tongue? I expected a blast of eloquence from you that’d push the whole Group up the gangplank.”

  “Bram’s bashful!” Dita teased. “He doesn’t like to make his convictions known!”

  I tried a sort of smile. “Pity me, people,” I said. “Before you stands a creature shorn of convictions, nekkid as a jay bird in the cold winds of indecision.”

  “Fresh out of long-johns,” Peter said, sobering. “But there’s plenty of sympathy available.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Noted and appreciated.”

  I couldn’t take my new doubt and indecision, the new tumult and pain to Obla—not when she was so much a part of it, so I took them up into the hills. I perched like a brooding buzzard on the stone spur outside the little cave, high above the Canyon. Wildly, until my throat ached and my voice croaked, I railed against this world and its limitations. Hoarsely I whispered over all the lets and hindrances that plagued us—that plagued me. And, infuriatingly, the world and all its echoes placidly paced my every argument with solid rebuttal. I was hearing with both ears now, one for my own voice, one for the world’s reply. And my voice got fainter and fainter, and Earth’s voice wasn’t a whisper any more.

  “Nothing is the way it should be!” I hoarsely yelled my last weary assault at the evening sky.

  “And never will be, short of eternity,” replied the streak of sunset crimson.

  “But we could do so much more—”

  “Whoever heard of bread made only of leaven?” replied the first evening star.

  “We’re being wasted,” I whispered.

  “So is the wheat when it’s broadcast in the field,” answered the fringe of pines on the crest of a far hill.

  “But Salla will go. She’ll be gone—”

  And nothing answered—only the wind cried and a single piece of dislodged gravel rattled down into the darkness.

  “Salla!” I cried. “Salla will be gone! Answer that one if you can!” But the world was through with answers. The wind became very busy humming through the dusk.

  “Answer me!” I had only a whisper left.

  “I will.” The voice was very soft but it shook me like a blast of lightning. “I can answer.” Salla eased lightly down on the spur beside me. “Salla is staying.”

  “Salla!” I could only clutch the rock and stare.

  “Mother had a quanic when I told her.” Salla smiled, easing the tight uncomfortable emotion. “I told her I needed a research paper to finish my Level requirements and that this would be just perfect for it.

  “She said I was too young to know my own mind. I said finishing high in my Level would be quite a feather in her cap—if you’ll pardon the provincialism. And she said she didn’t even know your parents.” Salla colored, her eyes wavering. “I told her there had been no word between us. That we were not Two-ing. Yet. Much.”

  “It doesn’t have to be now!” I cried, grabbing both her hands. “Oh, Salla! Now we can afford to wait!” And I yanked her off the spur into the maddest wildest flight of my life. Like a couple of crazy things we split and resplit the air above Baldy, soaring and diving like drunken lightning. But all the time part of us was moving so far, so fast, another part of us was talking quietly together, planning, wondering, rejoicing, as serenely as if we were back in the cave again, seeing each other in quiet reflective eyes. Finally darkness closed in entirely and we leaned exhausted against each other, drifting slowly toward the canyon floor.

  “Obla—” I said, “let’s go tell Obla.” There was no need to shield any part of my life from Salla any more. In fact there was a need to make it a cohesive whole, complete with both Obla and Salla.

  Obla’s windows were dark. That meant no one was visiting her. She would be alone. I rapped lightly on the door—my own particular rap.

  “Bram? Come in!” I caught welcome from Obla.

  “I brought Salla,” I said. “Let me turn the light on.” I stepped in.

  “Wait—”

  But simultaneously with her cry I flipped the light switch.

  “Salla,” I started, “this is—”

  Salla screamed and threw her arm across her eyes; a sudden over-flooding of horrified revulsion choked the room, and Obla was fluttering in the far upper corner of the room—hiding—hiding herself behind the agonized swirl of her hair, her broken body in the twisting of her white gown, pressing itself to the walls, struggling for escape, her startled physical and mental anguish moaning almost audibly around us.

  I grabbed Salla and yanked her out of the room, snapping the light off as we went. I dragged her out to the edge of the yard where the canyon walls shot upward. I flung her against the sandstone wall. She turned and hid her face against the rock, sobbing. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

  “How could you!” I gritted between my teeth, outraged anger thickening my words. “Is that the kind of people the Home is turning out now? Counting arms and legs and eyes more than the person?” Her tumbling hair whipped across my chin. “Permitting rejection and disgust for any living soul? Aren’t you taught even common kindness and compassion?” I wanted to hit her—to hit anything solid to protest this unthinkable thing that had been done to Obla, this unhealable wounding.

  Salla snatched herself out of my grasp and hovered just out of reach, wet eyes glaring angrily down at me.

  “It’s your fault, too!” she snapped, tears flowing. “I’d have died rather than do a thing like that to Obla or anyone else—if I had known! You didn’t tell me. You never visualized her that way—only strength and beauty and wholeness!”

  “Why not!” I shot back angrily, lifting level with her. “That’s the only way I ever see her any more. And trying to shift the blame—”

  “It is your fault! Oh, Bram!” And she was crying in my arms. When she could speak again between sniffs and hiccoughs, she said, “We don’t have people like that at Home. I mean, I never saw a—an incomplete person. I never saw scars and mutilation. Don’t you see, Bram? I was holding myself ready to receive her, completely—because she was part of you. And then to find myself embracing—” She choked. “Look—look, Bram, we have transgraph and—and regeneration—and no one ever stays unfinished.”

  I let go of her slowly, lost in wonder. “Regeneration? Transgraph?”

  “Yes, yes!” Salla cried. “She can have back her legs. She can have arms again. She can have her beautiful face again. She may even get back her eyes and her voice, though I don’t know for sure about that. She can be Obla again, instead of a dark prison for Obla.”

  “No one told us.”

  “No one asked.”

  “Common concern.”

  “I’ll ask then. Have you any dobic children? Any cases of cazerinea? Any trimorph semia? It’s not that we don’t want to ask. How are we to know what to ask? We’ve never even heard of a—a basket case.” She took the word from me. “It just didn’t occur to us to ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, drying her eyes with the palms of my hands, lacking anything better. “I should have told you.” My words were but scant surface indications of my deep abject apology.


  “Come,” she said, pulling away from me. “We must go to Obla— now—right now. “

  It was Salla who finally coaxed Obla back down to her bed. It was Salla who held the broken weeping face against her slight young shoulder and poured the healing balms of her sorrow and understanding over Obla’s wounds. And it was Salla who told Obla of what the Home held for her. Told her and told her and told her, until Obla finally believed.

  All three of us were limp and weary by then, and all three content just to sit for a minute, so the explosion of Davy into the room was twice the shock it ordinarily would have been.