No different flesh

by Зенна Гендерсон Гендерсон

  "Into the-" I gasped.

  "Of course, I didn't fall," she hastened. "I just lifted to the other side of the shaft out of reach, but-but he had pushed me so hard that he-he fell!"

  "He fell!" I started up in horror. "He fell? Child, that's hundreds of feet down onto rocks and water-"

  "I-I caught him before he fell all the way," said Marnie, apologetically. "But I had to do it our way. I stopped his falling-only-only he's just staying there! In the air! In the shaft! I know the inanimate lift, but he's alive. And I-don't-know-how-to-get-him-up!" She burst into tears.

  "And if I let him go, he will fall to death. And if I leave him there, he'll bob up and down and up and-I can't leave him there!" She flung herself against me, wailing. It was the first time she'd ever let go like that.

  Nils had come in at the tail end of her explanation and I filled him in between my muttered comforting of the top of Marnie's head. He went to the shed and came back with a coil of rope.

  "With a reasonable amount of luck, no one will see us," he said. "It's a good thing that we're out here by ourselves."

  Evening was all around us as we climbed the slope behind the house. The sky was high and a clear, transparent blue, shading to apricot, with a metallic orange backing the surrounding hills. One star was out, high above the evening-hazy immensity of distance beyond Margin. We panted up the hill to East Shaft. It was the one dangerous abandoned shaft among all the shallow prospect holes that dotted the hills around us. It had been fenced with barbwire and was forbidden territory to the children of Margin-including Marnie. Nils held down one strand of the barbwire with his foot and lifted the other above it. Marnie slithered through and I scrambled through, snatching the ruffle of my petticoat free from where it had caught on the lower barbs.

  We lay down on the rocky ground and edged up to the brink of the shaft. It was darker than the inside of a hat.

  "Derwent!" Nils's voice echoed eerily down past the tangle of vegetation clinging to the upper reaches of the shaft.

  "Here I am, Lord." The voice rolled up flatly, drained of emotion. "Death caught me in the midst of my sin. Cast me into the fire-the everlasting fire I traded a piddlin' little shed fire for. Kids-dime a dozen! I sold my soul for a seared face. Here I am, Lord. Cast me into the fire."

  Nils made a sound. If what I was feeling was any indication, a deep sickness was tightening his throat. "Derwent!" he called again, "I'm letting down a rope. Put the loop around your waist so we can pull you up!" He laid the rope out across a timber that slanted over the shaft. Down it went into the darkness-and hung swaying slightly.

  "Derwent!" Nils shouted. "Caleb Derwent! Get hold of that rope!"

  "Here I am, Lord," came the flat voice again, much closer this time. "Death caught me in the midst of my sin-"

  "Marnie," Nile said over the mindless mechanical reiteration that was now receding below. "Can you do anything?"

  "May I?" she asked. "May I, Uncle Nils?"

  "Of course," said Nils. "There's no one here to be offended. Here, take hold of the rope and-and go down along it so we'll know where you are."

  So Marnie stepped lightly into the nothingness of the shaft and, hand circling the rope, sank down into the darkness. Nils mopped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm.

  "No weight," he muttered, "not an ounce of weight on the rope!"

  Then there was a shriek and a threshing below us. "No! No!" bellowed Derwent, "I repent! I repent! Don't shove me down into everlasting-I" His words broke off and the rope jerked.

  "Marnie!" I cried. "What-what-"

  "He's-his eyes turned up and his mouth went open and he doesn't talk," she called up fearfully from the blackness. "I can't find his thoughts-"

  "Fainted!" said Nils. Then he called. "It's all right, Marnie. He's only unconscious from fright. Put the rope around him."

  So we drew him up from the shaft. Once the rope snatched out of our hands for several inches, but he didn't fall! The rope slacked, but he didn't fall! Marnie's anxious face came into sight beside his bowed head. "I can hold him from falling," she said, "but you must do all the pulling. I can't lift him."

  Then we had him out on the ground, lying flat, but in the brief interval that Nils used to straighten him out he drifted up from the ground about four inches. Marnie pressed him back.

  "He-he isn't fastened to the Earth with all the fastenings. I loosed some when I stopped his fall. The shaft helped hold him. But now I-I've got to fasten them all back again. I didn't learn that part very well at home. Everyone can do it for himself. I got so scared when he fell that I forgot all I knew. But I couldn't have done it with him still in the shaft anyway. He would have fallen." She looked around in the deepening dusk. "I need a source of light-"

  Light? We looked around us. The only lights in sight were the one star and a pinprick or so in the shadows of the fiat below us.

  "A lantern?" asked Nils.

  "No," said Marnie. "'Moonlight or sunlight or enough starlight. It takes light to 'platt'-" She shrugged with her open hands.

  "The moon is just past full," said Nils. "It'll be up soon-"

  So we crouched there on boulders, rocks, and pebbles, holding Derwent down, waiting for the moonrise to become an ingredient in fastening him to the Earth again. I felt an inappropriate bubble of laughter shaking my frightened shoulders. What a story to tell to my grandchildren! If I live through this ever to have any!

  Finally the moon came, a sudden flood through the transparency of the evening air. Marnie took a deep breath, her face very white in the moonlight. "It's-it's frightening!" she said. " 'Platting' with moonlight is an adult activity. Any child can 'platt' with sunlight, but," she shivered, "only the Old Ones dare use moonlight and sunlight together! I-I think I can handle the moonlight. I hope!"

  She lifted her two cupped hands. They quickly filled with a double handful of moonlight. The light flowed and wound across her palms and between her fingers, flickering live and lovely. Then she was weaving the living light into an intricate design that moved and changed and grew until it hid her arms to the elbows and cast light up into her intent face. One curve of it touched me. It was like nothing I'd ever felt before, so I jerked away from it. But, fascinated, I reached for it again. A gasp from Marnie stopped my hand.

  "It's too big," she gasped. "It's too powerful! I-I don't know enough to control-" Her fingers flicked and the intricate light enveloped Derwent from head to foot. Then there was a jarring and a shifting. The slopes around us suddenly became unstable and almost fluid. There was a grinding and a rumbling. Rocks clattered down the slopes beyond us and the lip of East Shaft crumpled. The ground dimpled in around where the shaft had been. A little puff of dust rose from the spot and drifted slowly away in the cooling night air. We sorted ourselves out from where we had tumbled, clutched in each other's arms. Marnie looked down at the completely relaxed Derwent. "It got too big, too fast," she apologized. "I'm afraid it spoiled the shaft."

  Nils and I exchanged glances and we both smiled weakly.

  "It's all right, Marnie," I said, "it doesn't matter. Is he all right now?"

  "Yes," said Marnie, "his thoughts are coming back."

  "Everything's fine," muttered Nils to me. "But what do you suppose that little earth-shaking has done to the mine?"

  My eyes widened and I felt my hands tighten. What, indeed, had it done to the mine?

  Derwent's thoughts came back enough that he left us the next day, sagging in his saddle, moving only because his horse did, headed for nowhere-just away-away from Margin, from Grafton's Vow, from Marnie. We watched him go, Marnie's face troubled.

  "He is so confused," she said. "If only I were a Sorter. I could help his mind-"

  "He tried to kill you!" I burst out, impatient with her compassion.

  "He thought he would never be able to come into the Presence because of me," she said quickly. "What might I have done if I had believed that of him?" So Derwent was gone-and so was the mine, irretrievably. The shaft, labor
iously drilled and blasted through solid rock, the radiating drifts, hardly needing timbering to support them because of the composition of the rock-all had splintered and collapsed. From the mine entrance, crushed to a cabin-sized cave, you could hear the murmur of waters that had broken through into, and drowned, the wreckage of the mine. The second day a trickle of water began a pool in the entrance. The third day the stream began to run down the slope toward town. It was soaked up almost immediately by the bone-dry ground, but the muddy wetness spread farther and farther and a small channel began to etch itself down the hill.

  It doesn't take long for a town to die. The workmen milled around at the mine entrance for a day or two, murmuring of earthquakes and other awesome dispensations from the hand of God, hardly believing that they weren't at work. It was like a death that had chopped off things abruptly instead of letting them grow or decrease gradually. Then the first of the families left, their good-bys brief and unemotional to hide the sorrow and worry in their eyes. Then others followed, either leaving their shacks behind them to fall into eventual ruin, or else their houses moved off down the road like shingled turtles, leaving behind them only the concrete foundation blocks.

  We, of course, stayed to the last, Nils paying the men off, making arrangements about what was left of the mining equipment, taking care of all the details attendant on the last rites of his career that had started so hopefully here in Margin. But, finally, we would have been packing, too, except for one thing. Marnie was missing.

  She had been horrified when she found what had happened to the mine. She was too crushed to cry when Loolie and Kenny and the Wardlows came to say good-by. We didn't know what to say to her or how to comfort her. Finally, late one evening, I found her sitting, hunched on her cot, her face wet with tears.

  "It's all right, Marnie," I said, "we won't go hungry. Nils will always find a way to-"

  "I am not crying for the mine," said Marnie and I felt an illogical stab of resentment that she wasn't. "It is a year," she went on. "Just a year."

  "A year?" Then remembrance flooded in. A year since the sullen smoke plumed up from the burning shed, since I felt the damp curling of freshly cut hair under my fingers-since Nils grimly dug the multiple grave. "But it should be a little easier now," I said.

  "It's only that on the Home it would have been Festival time-time to bring our flowers and lift into the skies and sing to remember all who had been Called during the year. We kept Festival only three days before the angry ones came and killed us." She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. "That was a difficult Festival because we were so separated by the Crossing. We didn't know how many of us were echoing our songs from Otherside."

  "I'm not sure I understand," I said. "But go on-cry for your dead. It will ease you."

  "I am not crying for those who have been Called," said Marnie. "They are in the Presence and need no tears. I am crying for the ones-if there are any-who are alive on this Earth we found. I am crying because-Oh, Aunt Gail!" She clung to me. "What if I'm the only one who was not Called? The only one!"

  I patted her shaking shoulders, wishing I could comfort her.

  "There was Timmy," she sniffed and accepted the handkerchief I gave her. "He-he was in our ship. Only at the last moment before Lift Off was there room

  for him to come with us. But when the ship melted and broke and we each had to get into our life-slips, we scattered like the baby quail Kenny showed me the other day. And only a few life-slips managed to stay together. Oh, I wish I knew!" She closed her wet eyes, her trembling chin lifting. "If only I knew whether or not Timmy is in the Presence!"

  I did all that I could to comfort her. My all was just being there.

  "I keep silent Festival tonight," she said finally, "trusting in the Power-"

  "This is a solemn night for us, too," I said. "We will start packing tomorrow. Nils thinks he can find a job nearer the Valley-" I sighed. "This would have been such a nice place to watch grow up. All it lacked was a running stream, and now we're even getting that. Oh, well-such is Life in the wild and woolly West!"

  And the next morning, she was gone. On her pillow was a piece of paper that merely said, "Wait."

  What could we do? Where could we look? Footprints were impossible on the rocky slopes. And for a Marnie, there could well be no footprints at all, even if the surroundings were pure sand. I looked helplessly at Nils. "Three days," he said, tightly angry. "The traditional three days before a funeral. If she isn't back by then, we leave."

  By the end of the second day of waiting in the echoless ghostliness of the dead town, I had tears enough dammed up in me to rival the new little stream that was cutting deeper and deeper into its channel. Nils was up at the mine entrance watching the waters gush out from where they had oozed at first. I was hunched over the stream where it made the corner by the empty foundation blocks of the mine office, when I heard-or felt-or perceived-a presence. My innards lurched and I turned cautiously. It was Marnie.

  "Where have you been?" I asked flatly.

  "Looking for another mine," she said matter-of-factly.

  "Another mine?" My shaking hands pulled her down to me and we wordlessly hugged the breath out of each other. Then I let her go.

  "I spoiled the other one," she went on as though uninterrupted. "I have found another, but I'm not sure you will want it."

  "Another? Not want it?" My mind wasn't functioning on a very high level, so I stood up and screamed, "Nils!"

  His figure popped out from behind a boulder and, after hesitating long enough to see there were two of us, he made it down the slope in massive leaps and stood panting, looking at Marnie. Then he was hugging the breath out of her and I was weeping over the two of them, finding my tears considerably fewer than I had thought. We finally all shared my apron to dry our faces and sat happily shaken on the edge of our front porch, our feet dangling.

  "It's over on the other side of the flat," said Marnie. "In a little canyon there. It's close enough so Margin can grow again here in the same place, only now with a running stream."

  "But a new mine! What do you know about mining?" asked Nils, hope, against his better judgment, lightening his face.

  "Nothing," admitted Marnie. "But I can identify and I took these-" She held out her hands. "A penny for copper. Your little locket," she nodded at me apologetically, "for gold. A dollar-" she turned it on her palm, "for silver. By the identity of these I can find other metals like them. Copper-there is not as much as in the old mine, but there is some in the new one. There is quite a bit of gold. It feels like much more than in the old mine, and," she faltered, "I'm sorry, but mostly there is only silver. Much, much more than copper. Maybe if I looked farther-"

  "But, Marnie," I cried, "silver is better! Silver is better!"

  "Are you serious?" asked Nils, the planes of his face stark and bony in the sunlight. "Do you really think you have found a possible mine?"

  "I don't know about mines," repeated Marnie, "but I know these metals are there. I can feel them tangling all over in the mountainside and up and down as the ground goes. Much of it is mixed with other matter, but it's like the ore they used to send out of Margin in the wagons with the high wheels. Only

  some of it is penny and locket and dollar feeling. I didn't know it could come

  that way in the ground."

  "Native silver," I murmured, "native copper and gold."

  "I-I could try to open the hill for you so you could see," suggested Marnie timidly to Nils's still face.

  "No," I said hastily. "No, Marnie. Nils, couldn't we at least take a look?"

  So we went, squeezing our way through the underbrush and through a narrow entrance into a box canyon beyond the far side of the flat. Pausing to catch my breath, almost pinned between two towering slabs of tawny orange granite, I glanced up to the segment of blue sky overhead. A white cloud edged into sight and suddenly the movement wasn't in the cloud, but in the mountain of granite. It reeled and leaned and seemed to be toppling. I snatch
ed my eyes away from the sky with a gasp and wiggled on through, following Marnie and followed by Nils.

  Nils looked around the canyon wonderingly. "Didn't even know this was here," he said. "No one's filed on this area. It's ours-if it's worth filing on. Our own mine-"

  Marnie knelt at the base of the cliff that formed one side of the canyon. "Here is the most," she said, rubbing her hand over the crumbling stone. "It is all through the mountain, but there is some silver very close here." She looked up at Nils and read his skepticism.

  "Well," she sighed. "Well-" And she sank down with the pool of her skirts around her on the sandy ground. She clasped her hands and stared down at them. I could see her shoulders tighten and felt something move-or change-or begin. Then, about shoulder high on the face of the rock wall, there was a coloring and a crumbling. Then a thin, bright trickle came from the rock and ran molten down to the sand, spreading flowerlike into a palm-sized disk of pure silver! "There," said Marnie, her shoulders relaxing. "That was close to the outside-"

  "Nils!" I cried. "Look!" and snatching up the still-hot metallic blossom, I dropped it again, the bright blood flowing across the ball of my thumb from the gashing of the sharp silver edge.

  It doesn't take long for a town to grow. Not if there's a productive mine and an ideal flat for straight, wide business streets. And hills and trees and a running stream for residential areas. The three of us watch with delighted wonder the miracle of Margin growing and expanding. Only occasionally does Marnie stand at the window in the dark and wonder if she is the only one-the last one-of her People left upon Earth. And only occasionally do I look at her and wonder where on Earth-or off it-did this casual miracle, this angel unawares, come from.

  "This angel unawares." Bethie's whisper echoed the last phrase of the Assembly.

  "Why I've been in Margin!" cried Meris. "I was there their last Founding Day and I didn't hear a word about Marnie!"