Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  A jab of lightning plunged from the top of the sky to the depth of the canyon below them, and thunder shook the projecting porch like an explosion. Lea gasped and clutched Deon. His arms closed around her as she buried her face against his shoulder, and she felt his face pressed against her hair.

  “I’m sorry,” she shuddered, still clinging. “I’m scared of so many things.”

  Wind whipped her skirts about her and stilled. The tumultuous threshing of the trees quieted, and Lea felt the tension drain out. She laughed a little and started to lift her head. Deon pressed it back to his shoulder.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “We’re on our way.”

  “Oh!” Lea gasped, clutching again. “Oh, no!”

  “Oh, yes,” Deon said. “Don’t bother to look. Right now you couldn’t see anything anyway. We’re in the clouds. But start getting used to the idea. We’ll be above them soon and the moon is full. That you must see.”

  Lea fought her terror, and slowly, slowly, it withdrew before a faint dawning wonder. “Oh!” she thought. “Oh!” as Karen’s forgotten words welled softly up out of memory—”arms remember when eyes forget.” “Oh, my goodness!” And her eyes flew open only to wince shut again against the outpouring of the full moon.

  “Wasn’t it—didn’t you—?” she faltered, peering narrowly up into Deon’s moon-whitened face.

  “That’s just what I was going to ask you,” Deon smiled. “Seems to me I should have recognized you before this, but remember, the first time I ever saw you you were neck-deep in water and stringy in the hair—one piece of it was plastered across your nose—and Karen didn’t even clue me!”

  “But look now! Just look now!”

  They had broken out of the shadows, and Lea looked below her at the serene tumble of clouds—the beyond-words wonder of a field of clouds under the moon. It was a beauty that not only fed the eyes but made all the senses yearn to encompass it and comprehend it. It sorrowed her not to be able to fill her arms with it and hold it so tight that it would melt right into her own self.

  Silently the two moved over acres and acres of the purity of curves, the ineffable delight of depth and height and changing shadows—a world, whole and complete in itself, totally unrelated to the earth below in the darkness.

  Finally Lea whispered, “Could I touch one? Could I actually put my hands into one of those clouds?”

  “Why, sure,” Deon said. “But, baby, it’s cold out there. We have considerable altitude to get over the storm. But if you like—”

  “Oh, yes!” Lea breathed. “It would be like touching the hem of heaven!”

  Not even feeling the bite of cold when Deon opened the shield, Lea reached out gently to touch the welling flank of the cloud. It closed over her hands, bodiless, beautiful, as intangible as light, as insubstantial as a dream, and, like a dream, it dissolved through her fingers. As Deon closed the shield again, Lea found herself gasping and shivering. She looked at her hands and saw them glisten moistly in the moonlight. She looked up at Deon, turning in his arms. “Share my cloud,” she said, and touched his cheek softly.

  It was hard to gauge time, moving above a wonderland of clouds like that below them, but it didn’t seem very long before Deon’s voice vibrated against Lea’s cheek where it rested against his shoulder. “We’re going down now. Stand by for turbulence. We’ll probably get tossed around a little.”

  Lea stirred and smiled. “I must have slept. I’m only dreaming all this.”

  “Pleasant dreams?”

  “Pleasant dreams.”

  “Here we go! Hang on!”

  Lea gasped as they plunged down toward the whiteness. All the serenity and beauty was gone with the snuffing out of the moon. Darkness and tumult were all around them. Wind grabbed them roughly and tossed them raggedly through the clouds, up, impossibly fast, down, incredibly far, twisting and tumbling, laced about by lightning, shaken by the blare of thunder, deafened—even though protected—by the myriad shrieking voices of the wind.

  “It’s death!” Lea thought frantically. “Nothing can live! It’s madness! It’s chaos!”

  And then, in the middle of the terrifying tumult, she became conscious of warmth and shelter and, more personally, the awareness of someone—the nearness of another’s breathing, the strength of arms.

  “This,” she thought wistfully, “must be like that love Karen mentioned. Out there all the storms of the world. In here, strength, warmth, and someone else.”

  A sudden down-draft flung them bodily out of the storm cloud, spinning them down to a staggering landing in the depth of Cougar Canyon, finally scraping them to a halt roughly against a yellow pine.

  “Hoosh!” Deon leaned against the trunk and sagged. “Now I’m glad I didn’t take the jalopy. That would have unscrewed every bolt in it. Thunderstorms are violent!”

  “I should say so.” Lea stirred in the circle of his arms. “But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It’d be better than cussing or crying any time! Such wonderful slam-banging!” She stepped away from him and looked around.

  “Where are we?” She prodded with her foot at the edge of a long indentation that ran darkly in the bright flush of lightning across the flat.

  “Just over the hill from the schoolhouse.”

  “Over the hill?” Lea looked around her in startled interest, “But there’s nothing here.”

  “How true.” Deon kicked a small clod into the darkness. “Nothing here but me. And this time last week I’d have sworn—Oh, well—”

  “You had me worried.” The two jumped, startled at the sudden voice from the darkness above. “I thought maybe you might have been dumped miles away or maybe that Lea’s toothbrush had slowed you down. Everyone’s waiting.” Karen touched down on the flat beside them.

  “Then it came?” Deon surged forward eagerly. “Did it work? What was—?”

  Karen laughed. “Simmer down, Deon. It arrived. It works. The Old Ones have called the Gathering and it’s all ready to go except for three empty seats we’re not filling. Alley-ooop!”

  And Lea found herself snatched into the air and over the hill beyond the flat before she could gasp or let fear catch up with her. And she was red-cheeked and laughing, her hair sparkling with the first of a sudden shower, when they landed on the school porch and let the sudden snarl of thunder and shout of wind push them through the door. They threaded their way through the chattering groups and found seats. Lea looked over at the corner where she usually sat—almost afraid she might see herself still sitting there, hunched over the miserly counting of the coins of her misery.

  She felt wonder and delight flood out into her arms and legs, and could hardly contain a wordless cry of joy. She spread her fingers on both hands, reaching, reaching openhanded, for what might be ahead.

  “Darkness will come again,” she admitted to herself. “This is just a chink in my prison—a promise of what is on the other side of me. But, oh! how wonderful—how wonderful!” She curled her fingers softly to hold a handful of the happiness and found it not strange that another hand closed warmly over hers. “These are people who will listen when I cry. They will help me find my answers. They will sustain me in the long long way that I must grope back to find myself again. But I’m not alone! Never alone again!”

  She let everything but the present moment shudder away on a happy shaken sigh as she murmured with the Group, “We are met together in Thy Name.”

  No one was at the desk. In the middle of it was the same small gadget, or one very like it, that had always been there. Valancy, tenderly burdened on one arm with the flannelly bundle of Our Baby, leaned over and touched the gadget.

  “I told you it would arrive okay.” The voice came so lifelike that Lea involuntarily searched the front of the room for the absent speaker.

  “And I’m to have the last say, after all.

  “Well, I suppose you’d like a theme, just to round out things for you—so here it is.

  “ ‘For ye shall pass over Jordan
to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you and ye shall possess it and dwell therein....’ “

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Jordan

  I guess I was the first to see it—the bright form among the clouds above Baldy. There seemed to be no interval of wondering or questioning in my mind. I knew the moment I caught the metallic gleam—the instant the curl-back of the clouds gave a brief glimpse of a long sleek curve. I knew and I gave a shout of delight. Here it was! What more direct answer to a prayer could any fellow want? Just like that! My release from rebellion, the long-awaited answer to my protests against restrictions! There above me was release! I emptied my two hands of the gravel I had made of two small rocks during the time I had brooded on my boulder, dusted my palms against my Levi’s, and lifted myself above the brush. I turned toward home, the tops of the underbrush ticking off the distance against my trailing toes. But oddly I felt a brief remote pang— almost of—regret?

  As I neared the Canyon I heard the cry and saw one after another of the Group shoot upward toward Baldy. I forgot that momentary pang and shot upward with the rest of them. And my hands were among the first to feel the tingly hot-and-cold sleekness of the ship that was cooling yet from the heat of entry into the atmosphere. It was only a matter of minutes before the hands of the whole Group from the Canyon bore the ship downward from the clouds to the haven of the pine flats beyond Cougar—bore it rejoicing, singing an almost forgotten welcome song of the People.

  ~ * ~

  Still tingling to the song, I rushed to Obla’s house, bringing, as always, any new event to her, since she could come to none.

  “Obla! Obla!” I cried as I slammed in through her door. “They’ve come! They’ve come! They’re here! Someone from the New Home—” Then I remembered, and I went in to her mind. The excitement so filled my own mind that I didn’t even have to verbalize for her before she caught the sight. Through my wordlessly sputtering delight I caught her faint chuckle. “Bram, the ship couldn’t have rainbows around it and be diamond-studded from end to end!”

  I laughed, too, a little abashed. “No, I guess not,” I thought back at her. “But it should have a halo on it!”

  Then for the next while I sat in the quiet room and relived every second of the event for Obla: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel of everything, including a detailed description of the—haloless—ship. And Obla, deaf, blind, voiceless, armless, legless, Obla who would horrify most any Outsider, lived the whole event with me, questioned me minutely, and finally lifted her unheard voice with the rest of us in the song of welcome.

  “Obla.” I moved closer to her and looked down at the quiet scarred face, framed in the abundance of dark vigorous hair. “Obla, it means the Home, the real Home. And for you—”

  “And for me—” Her lips tightened and her eyelids flattened. Then the curtain of her hair swirled across her face as she hid herself from my eyes. “Perhaps a kinder world to hide this hideous—”

  “Not hideous!” I cried indignantly.

  Her soft chuckle tickled my mind. “Well, not, anyway,” she said. “You’ll have to admit that the explosion didn’t leave much of me—” Her hair flowed back from her face and spread across the pillow.

  “The part of you that counts!” I exclaimed.

  “On Earth you need a physical container. One that functions. And just once I wish that—Her mind blanked before I could catch her wish. The glass of water lifted from the bedside stand and hovered at her mouth. She drank briefly. The glass slid back to its place.

  “So you’re all afire to blast off?” her thought teased. “Back to civilization! Farewell to the rugged frontier!”

  “Yes, I am,” I said defiantly. “You know how I feel. It’s criminal to waste lives like ours. If we can’t live to capacity here, let’s go Home!”

  “To which Home?” she questioned. “The one we knew is gone. What is the new one like?”

  “Well—” I hesitated, “I don’t know. We haven’t communicated yet. But it must be almost like the old Home. At least it’s probably inhabited by the People, our People.”

  “Are you so sure we’re still the same People?” Obla persisted. “Or that they are? Time and distance can change—”

  “Of course we’re the same,” I cried. “That’s like asking if a dog is a dog in the Canyon just because he was born in Socorro.”

  “I had a dog once,” Obla said. “A long time ago. He thought he was people because he’d never been around other dogs. It took him six months to learn to bark. It came as quite a blow to him when he found out he was a dog.”

  “If you mean we’ve deteriorated since we came—”

  “You chose the dog, not I. Let’s not quarrel. Besides I didn’t say that we were the dog.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Yeah, but—” she echoed, amused, and I laughed.

  “Darn you, Obla, that’s the way most of my arguments with you end—yeah-but, yeah-but!”

  ~ * ~

  “Why don’t they come out?” I rapped impatiently against the vast seamless bulk, shadowy above me in the night. “What’s the delay?”

  “You’re being a child, Bram,” Jemmy said. “They have their reasons for waiting. Remember this is a strange world to them. They must be sure—“

  “Sure!” I gestured impatiently. “We’ve told them the air’s okay and there’s no viruses waiting to snap them off. Besides they have their personal shields. They don’t even have to touch this earth if they don’t want to. Why don’t they come out?”

  “Bram.” I recognized the tone of Jemmy’s voice.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” I said. “Impatience, impatience. Everything in its own good time. But now, Jemmy, now that they’re here, you and Valancy will have to give in. They’ll make you see that the thing for us People to do is to get out completely or else get in there with the Outsiders and clean up this mess of a world. With this new help we could do it easily. We could take over key positions—”

  “No matter how many have come—and we don’t know yet how many there are,” Jemmy said, “this ‘taking over’ isn’t the way of the People. Things must grow. You only graft in extreme cases. And destroy practically never. But let’s not get involved in all that again now. Valancy—”

  Valancy slanted down, the stars behind her, from above the ship. “Jemmy.” Their hands brushed as her feet reached the ground. There it was again. That wordless flame of joy, that completeness as they met, after a long ten minutes’ separation. That made me impatient, too. I never felt that kind of oneness with anyone.

  I heard Valancy’s little laugh. “Oh, Bram,” she said, “do you have to have your whole dinner in one gulp? Can’t you be content to wait for anything?”

  “It might be a good idea for you to do a little concentrated thinking,” Jemmy said. “They won’t be coming out until morning. You stay here on guard tonight—”

  “On guard against what?” I asked.

  “Against impatience,” Jemmy said, his voice taking on the Old One tone that expected obedience without having to demand it. Amusement had crept back into his voice before his next sentence. “For the good of your soul, Bram, and the contemplation of your sins, keep watch this whole night. I have a couple of blankets in the pickup.” He gestured, and the blankets drifted through the scrub oak. “There, that’ll hold you till morning.”

  I watched the two of them meet with the pickup truck above the thin trickle of the creek. Valancy called back, “Thinking might help, Bram. You should try it.”

  A startled night bird flapped dismally ahead of them for a while, and then the darkness took them all.

  I spread the blankets on the sand by the ship, leaning against the smooth coolness of its outer skin, marveling anew at its seamlessness, the unbroken flow along its full length. Somewhere there had to be an exit, but right now the evening light ran uninterrupted from glowing end to glowing end.

  Who was in there? How many were in there?
A ship of this size could carry hundreds. Their communicator and ours had spoken briefly together, ours stumbling a little with words we remembered of the Home tongue that seemed to have changed or fallen out of use, but no mention of numbers was made before the final thought: “We are tired. It’s a long journey. Thanks be to the Power, the Presence, and the Name that we have found you. We will rest until morning.”

  The drone of a high-flying turbo-jet above the Canyon caught my ear. I glanced quickly up. Our un-light still humped itself up over the betraying shine of the ship. I relaxed on the blankets, wondering—wondering...

  It was so long ago—back in my grandparents’ day—that it all happened. The Home, smashed to a handful of glittering confetti—the People scattered to every compass point, looking for refuge. It was all in my memory, the stream of remembrance that ties the People so strongly together. If I let myself I could suffer the loss, the wandering, the tedium and terror of the search for a new world. I could live again the shrieking incandescent entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the heat, the vibration, the wrenching and shattering. And I could share the bereavement, the tears, the blinding maiming agony of some of the survivors who made it to Earth. And I could hide and dodge and run and die with all who suffered the settlement period-—trying to find the best way to fit in unnoticed among the people of Earth and yet not lose our identity as the People.