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 dean up Susie’s and Valancy’s desks, 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 schoolroom 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 lunchtime and would serve to carry our greenery home in, too, stretcher fashion.
Released from the schoolroom, 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 had seen 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 schoolhouse.”
“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?” Lizbeth quavered, 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 whiplash. “All of you get under the tarp!”
“It won’t do any good,” Kiah bellowed. “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. Hoping even at this awful moment that Valancy wouldn’t see me, I lifted 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 plagued 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 ram.
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 pickup, lifting over the steaming streaming manzanita, over the trackless mountainside 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 dung to Father in an ecstasy 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 schoolhouse 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 twins’ 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?” the Oldest asked quietly.
“What does it matter?” Valancy flared. 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!” Valancy cried. “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?” Father asked.
Before Valancy could answer the door was flung open and Jemmy stalked defiantly in.
“Go!” the Oldest said.
“Please,” Jemmy said, 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,” the Oldest One said to Valancy.
“All right then,” Valancy said. “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 me from giving totals to 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,” the Oldest said.
“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,” the Oldest said. “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 her knowing 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 someone 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! 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.
Interlude: Lea 2
It was as though silver curtains were shimmering back across some magic picture, warm with remembered delight. Lea took a deep breath and, with a realization as sudden as the bursting of a bubble, became aware that she had completely forgotten herself and her troubles for the first time in months and months. And it felt good—oh, so good—so smooth, so smilingly relaxing. “If only,” she thought wistfully. “If only!” And then shivered under the bare echoless thunk as things-as-they-are thudded against the blessed shelter Karen had loaned her. Her hands tightened bitterly.
Someone laughed softly into the silence. “Have you found him yet, Karen? You started looking long enough ago—”
“Not so long,” Karen smiled, still entangled in the memories she had relived. “And I have got my degree now. Oh, I had forgotten so much—the wonder—the terror—” She dreamed a moment longer, then shook her head and laughed.
“There, Jemmy, I seen my duty and I done it. Whose hot little hands hold the next installment?”
Jemmy smoothed out his crumpled paper. “Well, Peter’s next, I guess. Unless Bethie wants to—”
“Oh no, oh no!” Bethie’s soft voice protested. “Peter, Peter can do it better—he was the one—I mean—Peter!”
Everyone laughed. “Okay, Bethie, okay!” Jemmy said. “Cool down. Peter it will be. Well, Peter, you have until tomorrow evening to get organized. I think after the excitement of the day, one—well—installment will be enough.”
The crowd stood up and swirled and moved. The soft murmur of their voices and laughter washed over Lea like a warm ocean
.
“Lea.” It was Karen. “Here’s Jemmy and Valancy. They want to meet you.”
Lea struggled to her feet, feeling impaled by their interested eyes. She felt welcome enwrapping her—a welcome far beyond any words. She felt a pang catch painfully somewhere in her chest, and to her bewilderment tears began to wash down her cheeks. She turned her head aside and groped for a handkerchief. Someone tucked a huge white one into her hands and someone’s shoulder was strong and steady for a moment and someone’s arms were deft and sure as they lifted her and bore her, blind with sobless weeping, away from the schoolhouse.
Later—oh, much later—she suddenly sat up in her bed. Karen was there instantly, noiselessly.
“Karen, was that supposed to be real?”
“Was what supposed to be real?”
“That story you told. It wasn’t true, was it?”
“But of course. Every word of it.”
“But it can’t be!” Lea cried. “People from space! Magic people! It can’t be true.”
“Why don’t you want it to be true?”
“Because—because! It doesn’t fit. There’s nothing outside of what is—I mean, you go around the world and come back to where you started from. Everything ends back where it started from. There are boundaries beyond which—” Lea groped for words. “Anything outside the bounds isn’t true!”
“Who defines the boundaries?”
“Why, they’re just there. You get trapped in them when you’re born.
You have to bear them till you die.”
“Who sold you into slavery?” Karen asked wonderingly. “Or did you volunteer? I agree with you that everything comes back to where it started, but where did everything start?”
Ingathering Page 5
