Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “Never satisfied,” said Mark. “The more you hear the more you want to hear—”

  “I’ve never Assembled much beyond that,” said Bethie. Then she held up a cautioning hand. “Wait—

  “Oh,” she said, listening. “Oh, dear! Of course.” She stood up, her face a pale blur in the darkness of the patio. “That was Debbie. She’s on her way here. She says Dr. Curtis needs me back at the Group. Valancy sent her because she’s the one who came back from the New Home and ‘Peopled all over the place,’ as she says. I have to leave immediately. There isn’t time for a car. Luckily it’s dark enough now. Debbie has her part all Assembled already so she can—”

  “I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon,” said Meris, following her inside and helping her scramble her few belongings into her small case.

  “There is so much—There’s always so much—You’ll enjoy Debbie’s story.” Bethie was drifting steplessly out the door. “And there are others—” She was a quickening shadow rising above the patio and her whispered “Good-by” came softly down through the overarching tree branches.

  “Hi!” The laughing voice startled them around from their abstraction. “Unless I’ve lost my interpretive ability, that’s an awfully wet, hungry cry coming from in there!”

  “Oh, ‘Licia, honey!” Meris fled indoors, crooning abject apologies as she went.

  “Well, hi to you, then.” The woman stepped out of the shadows and offered a hand to Mark. “I’m Debbie. Sorry to snatch Bethie away, but Dr. Curtis had to have her stat. She’s our best Sensitive and he has a puzzlesome emergency to diagnose. She’s his court of last resort!”

  “Dr. Curtis?” Mark returned her warm firm clasp. “That must be the doctor Johannan was trying to find to lead him to the Group.”

  “Is so,” said Debbie. “Our Inside-Outsider. He’s a fixture with us now. Not that he stays with the Group, but he functions as One of Us.” “Come on in,” said Mark, holding the kitchen door open. “Come in and have some coffee.”

  “Thank you kindly,” laughed Debbie. “It’s right sightly of you to ask a stranger to ‘light and set a spell.’ No.” She smiled at Mark’s questioning eyes. “That’s not the way they talk on the New Home. It’s only a slight lingual hangover from the first days of my Return. That’s the Assembly Valancy sent me to tell you.”

  She sat at the kitchen table, and Mark gathered up his battered, discolored coffee mug and Meris’s handleless one and a brightly company-neat cup for Debbie. There wasn’t much left of the coffee, but by squeezing hard enough, he achieved three rather scanty portions.

  After the flurry of building more coffee and Meris’s return with a solemnly blinking ‘Licia to be exclaimed over and inspected and loved and fed and adored and bedded again, they decided to postpone Debbie’s installment until after their own supper.

  “This Assembling business is getting to be as much an addiction as watching TV,” said Mark, mending the fire in the fireplace.

  “Well, there’s addiction and addiction,” said Meris as Mark returned to the couch to sit on the other side of Debbie. “I prefer this one. This is for real—hard as it is to believe.”

  “For real,” mused Debbie, clasping their hands. “I could hardly believe it was for real then, either. Here is how I felt—”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Return

  I was afraid. When the swelling bulk of the Earth blotted our ports, I was afraid for the first time. Fear was a sudden throb in my throat and, almost as an echo, a sudden throb from Child Within reminded me why it was that Earth was swelling in our ports after such a final good-by. Drawn by my mood, Thann joined me as the slow turning of our craft slid the Earth out of sight.

  “Apprehensive?” he asked, his arm firm across my shoulders.

  “A little.” I leaned against him. “This business of trying to go back again is a little disquieting. You can’t just slip back into the old mold. Either it’s changed or you’ve changed—or both. I realize that.”

  “Well, the best we can do is give it the old college try,” he said. “And all for Child Within. I hope he appreciates it.”

  “Or she.” I glanced down at my unfamiliar proportions. “As the case may be. But you do understand, don’t you?” Need for reassurance lifted my voice a little. “Thann, we just had to come back. I just couldn’t bear the thought of Child Within being born in that strange—tidy—” My voice trailed off and I leaned more heavily, sniffing.

  “Listen, Debbie-my-dear!” Thann shook me gently and hugged me roughly. “I know, I know! While I don’t share your aching necessity for Earth, I agreed, didn’t I? Didn’t I sweat blood in that dern Motiver school, learning to manipulate this craft? Aren’t we almost there?”

  “Almost there! Oh, Thann! Oh, Thann!” Our craft had completed another of its small revolutions, and Earth marched determinedly across the port again. I pressed myself against the pane, wanting to reach—to gather in the featureless mists, the blurred beauties of the world, and hold them so close—so close that even Child Within would move to their wonder.

  ~ * ~

  I’m a poor hand at telling time. I couldn’t tell you even to within a year how long ago it was that Shua lifted the Ship from the flat at Cougar Canyon and started the trip from Earth to The Home. I remembered how excited I was. Even my ponytail had trembled as the great adventure began. Thann swears he was standing so close to me at Takeoff that the ponytail tickled his nose. But I don’t remember him. I don’t even remember seeing him at all during the long trip when the excitement of being evacuated from Earth dulled to the routine of travel and later became resurrected as anxiety about what The Home would be like.

  I don’t remember him at all until that desolate day on The Home when I stood at the end of the so-precise little lane that wound so consciously lovely from the efficient highway. I was counting, through the blur of my tears, the precisely twenty-six trees interspersed at suitable intervals by seven clumps of underbrush. He just happened to be passing at the moment and I looked up at him and choked, “Not even a weed! Not one!”

  Astonished, he folded his legs and hovered a little above eye level.

  “What good’s a weed?”

  “At least it shows individuality!” I shut my eyes, not caring that by so doing the poised tears consolidated and fell. “I’m so sick of perfection!”

  “Perfection?” He lifted a little higher above me, his eyes on some far sight. “I certainly wouldn’t call The Home perfect yet. From here I can see the North Reach. We’ve only begun to nibble at that. The preliminary soil crew is just starting analysis.” He dropped down beside me. “We can’t waste time and space on weeds. It’ll take long enough to make the whole of The Home habitable without using energy on nonessentials.”

  “They’ll find out!” I stubbornly proclaimed. “Someday they’ll find out that weeds are essentials. Man wasn’t made for such—such neatness. He has to have unimportant clutter to relax in!”

  “Why haven’t you presented these fundamental doctrines to the Old Ones?” He laughed at me.

  “Have I not!” I retorted. “Well, maybe not to the Old Ones, but I’ve already expressed myself, and furthermore, Mr.— Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Debbie—”

  “I’m Thannel,” he grinned.

  “—Thannel, I’ll have you know other wiser heads than mine have come to the same conclusion. Maybe not in my words, but they mean the same thing. This artificiality—this—this— The People aren’t meant to live divorced from the—the—” I spread my hands. “Soil, I guess you could say. They lose something when everything gets—gets paved.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll manage.” He smiled. “Memory can sustain.”

  “Memory? Oh, Thann, remember the tangle of blackberry vines in back of Kroginold’s house? How we used to burrow under the scratchy, cool, green twilight under those vines and hunt for berries—cool ones from the shadows, and warm ones from the sun, and always at least one thorn in the thumb as payment fo
r trespassing. Mmmm—” Eyes closed, I lost myself in the memory.

  Then my eyes flipped open. “Or are you from the other Home? Maybe you’ve never even seen Earth.”

  “Yes, I have,” he said, suddenly sober. “I’m from Bendo. I haven’t many happy memories of Earth. Until your Group found us, we had a pretty thin time of it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Bendo was our God Bless for a long time when I was little.”

  “Thank you.” He straightened briskly and grinned. “How about a race to the twenty-third despised tree, just to work off a little steam!”

  And the two of us lifted and streaked away, a yard above the careful gravel of the lane, but I got the giggles so badly I that I blundered into the top of the twenty-first tree and had to be extricated gingerly from its limbs. Together we guiltily buried at its foot the precious tiny branch I had broken off in my blundering, and then, with muffled laughter and guilty back-glances, we went our separate ways.

  That night I lay and waited for the pale blue moon of The Home to vault into the sky, and thought about Earth and the Other Home.

  The other Home was first, of course—the beautiful prototype of this Home. But it had weeds! And all the tangled splendor of wooded hillsides and all the soaring upreach of naked peaks and the sweet uncaring, uncountable profusion of life, the same as Earth. But The Home died—blasted out of the heavens by a cosmic Something that shattered it and scattered the People like birds from a falling tree. Part of them found this Home— or the bare bones of it—and started to remake it into The Home. Others found refuge on Earth. We had it rough for a long time because we were separated from each other. Besides, we were Different, with a capital D, and some of us didn’t survive the adjustment period. Slowly, though, we were Gathered In until there were two main Groups—Cougar Canyon and Bendo. Bendo lived in a hell of concealment and fear long after Cougar Canyon had managed to adjust to an Outsider’s world.

  Then that day—even now my breath caught at the wonder of that day when the huge ship from the New Home drifted down out of the skies and came to rest on the flat beyond the schoolhouse!

  And everyone had to choose. Stay or go. My family chose to go. More stayed. But the Oldest, Cougar Canyon’s leader, blind, crippled, dying from what the Crossing had done to him, he went. But you should see him now! You should see him see! And Obla came too. Sometimes I went to her house just to touch her hands. She had none, you know, on Earth. Nor legs nor eyes, and hardly a face. An explosion had stripped her of all of them. But now, because of transgraph and regeneration, she is becoming whole again—except perhaps her heart—but that’s another story.

  Once the wonder of the trip and the excitement of living without concealment, without having to watch every movement so’s not to shock Outsiders, had died a little, I got homesicker and homesicker. At first I fought it as a silly thing, a product of letdown, or idleness. But a dozen new interests, frenzied activities that consumed every waking moment, did nothing to assuage the aching need in me. I always thought homesickness was a childish, transitory thing. Well, most of it, but occasionally there is a person who actually sickens of it and does not recover, short of Return. And I guess I was one of those. It was as though I were breathing with one lung or trying to see with one eye. Sometimes the growing pain became an anguish so physical that I’d crouch in misery, hugging my hurt to me, trying to contain it between my knees and my chest— trying to ease it. Sometimes I could manage a tear or two that relieved a little—such as that day in the lane with Thann.

  ~ * ~

  “Thann!” I turned from the port. “Isn’t it about time—”

  “One up on you, Debbie-my-dear,” Thann called from the Motive room. “I’m just settling into the old groove. Got to get us slowed down before we scorch our little bottoms and maybe even singe Child Within.”

  “Don’t joke about it!” I said. “Remember, the first time, the atmosphere gave us too warm a welcome to Earth. Ask the Oldest.”

  “The Power be with us,” came Thann’s quick answering thought.

  “And the Name and the Presence,” I echoed, bowing my head as my fingers moved to the Sign and then clasped above Child Within. I moved over to the couch and lay down, feeling the almost imperceptible slowing of our little craft.

  Thann and I started two-ing not long after we met and, at flahmen Gathering time, we Bespoke one another and, just before Festival time, we were married.

  Perhaps all this time I was hoping that starting a home of my own would erase my longing for Earth, and perhaps Thann hoped the same thing. The Home offered him almost all he wanted and he had a job he loved. He felt the pioneering thrill of making a new world and was contented. But my need didn’t evaporate. Instead, it intensified. I talked it over with the Sorter for our Group (a Sorter cares for our emotional and mental problems) because I was beginning to hate—oh, not hate! That’s such a poisonous thing to have festering in your mind. But my perspective was getting so twisted that I was making both myself and Thann unhappy. She Sorted me deftly and thoroughly—and I went home to Thann and he started training to develop his latent Motive ability. We both knew we could well lose our lives trying to return to Earth, but we bad to try. Anyway, I had to try, especially after I found out about Child Within. I told Thann and his face lighted up as I knew it would, but—

  “This ought to make a bond between you and The Home,” he said. “Now you’ll find unsuspected virtues in this land you’ve been spurning.”

  I felt my heart grow cold. “Oh, no, Thann!” I said. “Now more than ever we must go. Our child can’t be born here. He must be of Earth. And I want to be able to enjoy this Child Within—”

  “This is quite a Child Without,” said Thann, tempering the annoyance in his voice by touching my cheek softly, “crying for a lollipop, Earth flavored. Ah, well!” He gathered me into his arms. “Hippity-hop to the candy shop!”

  ~ * ~

  A high thin whistle signaled the first brush of Earth’s atmosphere against our craft—as though Earth were reaching up to scrape tenuous incandescent fingers against our underside. I cleared my mind and concentrated on the effort ahead. I’m no Motiver, but Thann might need my strength before we landed.

  Before we landed! Setting down on the flat again, under Old Baldy! And seeing them all again! Valancy and Karen and the Francher Kid. Oh, the song the Kid would be singing would be nothing to the song my heart would be singing! Home! Child Within! Home again! I pressed my hands against the swell of Child Within. Pay attention, I admonished. Be ready for your first consciousness of Earth. “I won’t look,” I told myself. “Until we touch down on the flat. I’ll keep my eyes shut!” And I did.

  So when the first splashing crash came, I couldn’t believe it. My eyes opened to the sudden inrush of water and I was gasping and groping in complete bewilderment trying to find air. “Thann! Thann!” I was paddling awkwardly, trying to keep my head above water. What had happened? How could we have so missed the Canyon—even as inexperienced a Motiver as Thann was? Water? Water to drown in, anywhere near the Canyon?

  There was a gulp and the last bubble of air belched out of our turning craft. I was belched out through a jagged hole along with the air.

  Thann! Thann! I abandoned vocal calling and spread my cry clear across the band of subspeech. No reply—no reply! I bobbed on the surface of the water, gasping. Oh, Child, stay Within. Be Careful. Be Careful! It isn’t time yet. It isn’t time!

  I shook my dripping hair out of my eyes and felt a nudge against my knees. Down I went into darkness, groping, groping—and found him! Inert, unresponsive, a dead weight in my arms. The breathless agony of struggle ended in the slippery mud of a rocky shore. I dragged him up far enough that his head was out of the water, listened breathlessly for a heartbeat, then, mouth to mouth, I breathed life back into him and lay gasping beside him in the mud, one hand feeling the struggle as his lungs labored to get back into rhythm. The other hand was soothing Child Within. Not now, not now! Wait—w
ait!

  When my own breathing steadied, I tore strips off my tattered travel suit and bound up his head, staunching the blood that persistently threaded down from the gash above his left ear. Endlessly, endlessly, I lay there listening to his heart—to my heart—-too weak to move him, too weak to move myself. Then the rhythm of his breathing changed and I felt his uncertain thoughts, questioning, asking. My thoughts answered his until he knew all I knew about what had happened. He laughed a ghost of a laugh.

  “Is this untidy enough for you?” And I broke down and cried.

  We lay there in mud and misery, gathering our strength. I started once to a slithering splash across the water from us and felt a lapping of water over my feet. I pulled myself up on one elbow and peered across at the barren hillside. A huge chunk of it had broken off and slithered down into the water. The scar was raw and ragged in the late evening sunshine.