No different flesh

by Зенна Гендерсон Гендерсон

  Still full of the warm, prayerlike feeling that follows the Channeling, we walked back toward the house in the half dark.

  "You've been missing Remy," said Mother.

  "Yes," I sighed. "It wouldn't be so bad if we were back with the Group, but being up here till Father's shift is over makes it kinda lonesome. Even with Remy coming back here to sleep, it's not the same. There's nothing to do-"

  Mother laughed. "I'd like a dime for every time a child has said that to a parent! Why not use this so empty rime to develop a new Gift or Persuasion?"

  "Like what?" I wasn't very enthusiastic.

  "Well." Mother considered. "Why not something that would go along with being a Sensitive? You're Gifted with that already. Choose something that has to do with Sensing things. Take metal or water or some Awareness like that. It might come in handy sometime, and you could map the springs or ore deposits for the Group. Your father has the forestry maps for this area, but the People haven't mapped it yet."

  Well, the idea was better than nothing, so that evening Mother helped me review the Awareness of water and metal and I set my mind to Group Memory that night so by morning I had a pretty good idea of the Basics of the job. It'd take years really to be an expert, but I could play around with it for the rest of the summer.

  Water wasn't scarce enough in Cayuse Canyon to make looking for it much fun, though I loved the little blind stream I found in a cave above the creek, so I tried the metal Awareness and got pretty adept by the evening of the first day. Adept, that is, at finding campers' dumps and beef cans-which isn't much to brag about. It's like finding a telephone pole when you're really looking for a toothpick.

  By the end of the week, I had fined down my Sensing. Hovering a hundred feet or so over the surface, I had found an old, two-tined fork buried under two and a half feet of silt at the base of one of the Chimneys, and an ox shoe caught in a cleft of rock six feet above the creek on another of the Chimneys. Don't ask me how it got there.

  "Big deal!" Remy shoved the shoe with his finger when I showed the family my spoils after supper that night. "Both of them iron both manufactured. Big dealt"

  I flushed and talked right back at him as I practically never do. "How far did you move the world today, wise guy? Was that the house I heard roaring past me this afternoon or a matchbox you managed to tilt off the table?"

  Which was hardly fair of me because he was having a lot of trouble with his Motiving and had got his reactions so messed up that he could hardly lift anything now. Sort of a centipede trying to watch his feet when he walks. The trouble would clear up, of course, with further training, but Remy's not the patient type.

  "Who's a wise guy?" Before I knew it, I was pressed against the ceiling, the light fixture too hot near the back of my neck.

  "Remy!" Mother cried out. "Not at the table!"

  "Put her down." Father didn't raise his voice, but I was tumbled back so fast that the hem of my skirt caught the flower bowl and nearly pulled it off the table.

  "I'm sorry." Remy glared at his clenched hands on the table and shut us all

  out so completely that we all blinked, and he kept us out all the rest of the evening.

  He hardly said good-by when he left next morning, kicking petulantly at the top of the pinyon tree by the gate as he went by. Mother and Father looked at each other and shook their heads like parents and Father folded his mouth like a father and I was sorry I had started the whole thing-though I'm not sure I did.

  I had fun all day. I was so absorbed in sorting out the different junk I Sensed that I lost track of time and missed lunch completely. When I checked the shadows for the time, it was long past the hour and I was too far to bother with going home. I wanted to finish this part of the Chimneys before going home anyway. So I sighed and filled my empty stomach with fresh cold spring water and took off again, enjoying the sweep of wind that brushed my hair back from my neck and dried the perspiration.

  Well, concentration paid off! Around about four o'clock I sensed a metal deep inside the last of the towering Chimneys. Or the first one, depending on which mountain you started counting from. Anyway, I sensed a metal near the base of the last one-and not iron and not manufactured! Excitedly I landed on the flank of the mountain and searched out the exact spot. I tore my shirt and scratched my cheek and broke two fingernails before I found the spot in the middle of a brush pile. I traced with my finger the short, narrow course. Wire gold. Six feet inside the solid rock beneath me. Almost four inches of it, as thick as a light bulb filament! I laughed at my own matchbox I'd tilted off the table, but I was pleased anyway. It was small, for sure, but I'd found it, hadn't I? From over a hundred feet up?

  It was getting late and I was two-meal hungry, so I lifted up to the top of the last Chimney and teetered on its crumbling granite capstone to check my directions. I could short-cut home in a fraction of the time I'd taken to get here. The panorama laid out at my feet was so breathtakingly lovely that I could hardly leave it, but I finally launched myself in the direction of home. I cut diagonally away from the Chimneys, headed for the notch in the hills just beyond the old Selkirk mine. Half unconsciously I checked off metal as I passed above it. It was all ABC easily detected stuff like barbwire fence, tin can, roofing, barrel hoop-all with the grating feeling that meant rust.

  Then suddenly there it was in my Awareness-slender and shiny and smooth and complicated! I checked in mid-air and circled. Beer can, wire fence, horseshoe-slender and shiny and smooth and not iron! I slid to a landing on the side of the mountain. What could it be? A water tank? Some mining equipment? But it was unrusted, sleek and shiny and slender. But how tall? If only I knew a little about sizes and contents. I could tell sizes of things I was familiar with, but not of this thing. I lifted and circled till I caught it again and narrowed my circle smaller and smaller until I was hovering. Over the old Selkirk mine. I grimaced, disappointed, and Sensed, a little annoyed, the tangly feeling of all the odds and ends of silver left in the fifty-years-abandoned old mine, and the traces of a lot of other metals I didn't know yet. Then I sighed. Must have misinterpreted, but big and shiny, smooth and complicated-that's what it still felt like to me. Nasty break. Back to the Differentiations again, girl!

  My hunger hurried my lifting for home so much that I had to activate my personal shield to cut the wind.

  Before I even got in sight of the ranger station where we were spending our summer in our yearly required shift for the Group, I felt Remy calling for me. Well, maybe not me by name, but he was needing comfort in large quantities and who better than his shadow to give it to him. So I zeroed in on our walnut tree and stumbled to a stop just behind him as he sat hunched morosely over himself.

  "I'm grounded," he said. "Ron says not to come back until I'm Purged. Father says I can start clearing brush out of the campsites tomorrow."

  "Oh, Remy!" I cried, dismayed for his unhappiness. "Why?"

  He grinned unhappily. "Ron says I can't learn as long as I'm trying to learn for the wrong reason."

  "Wrong reason?" I asked.

  "Yeah. He said I don't want to be a Motiver just to be a Motiver. I want to learn to be one so I can show people up, like Father and you and the O1d Ones. He says I don't want to get into Space because of any real interest in Space, but because I'm mad at The People for not telling the world they can do it right now if they want to. He says-" Remy pulled a double handful of grass with sharp, unhappy yanks "-he says he has no intention of teaching me anything as long as I only want to learn it for such childish reasons. What does he think I'm going to do, drop another Hiroshima bomb?"

  I checked firmly the surge of remembered sorrow at his words. "One of us was there in that plane," I said. "Remember?"

  "But he didn't use any of the Designs or Persuasions in the dropping of the Bomb-"

  "No. If he had, we probably never would have been able to help him out of the Darkness afterward. Maybe Ron's afraid you might do something as bad as that if you learn to be a Motiver and then ge
t mad."

  "That's silly!" cried Remy. "I wasn't even born when the Bomb fell! And as if I'd ever do a thing like that anyway!"

  "Maybe you wouldn't, but if you don't know how to be a Motiver, you can't. Remember, every person who ever did anything bad was seventeen once, and anger starts awfully early. Some kids start to crook their trigger fingers in their cradles-"

  "I still think it's a lot of foolish fuss over nothing-"

  "If it's nothing," I said, "give it up."

  "Why should I?" he flared. "I want-"

  "What's the matter with you this summer, Remy?" I asked. "Why are you so prickly?"

  "I'm not-" he began. Then he flushed and lay back against the hillside, covering his eyes with his arm. "Sorry, Shadow," he said gently after a while. "I don't know what it is. I just feel restless and irritable. Growing pains, I guess. And I guess it bothers me that I don't have any special outstanding Gift like you do. I guess I'm groping to find out what I'm supposed to do. Do you think it's because we're part Outsider? Remember, Mother's a Blend."

  "I know," I said, "but Mother managed to work out all her difficulties. You will too. You wait and see. Besides, a lot of kids that aren't Blends don't develop their Gifts until later. Just be patient." Then I sighed without sound, thinking that to tell Remy to be patient was like telling the Cayuse to flow uphill.

  It wasn't until we were at the supper table that I remembered my find of the day. "I found gold today!" I said, feeling a flush of pleasure warming my face. "Real unmanufactured gold!"

  "Well!" Father's fork paused in mid-air. "That's pretty good for a second week. When do we start carting it away? Will a bucket do, or shall I get a wheelbarrow?"

  "Oh, Father, don't tease," I said. "You know this isn't gold-like-that country! It was just a short wire of it, six feet inside a granite slope. But now I know what gold feels like-and silver and-and something slender and shiny-"

  I broke off, suddenly not wanting to detail all my findings. Fortunately my last words were swallowed up in activity as Remy cleared the table so Mother could bring in the dessert. It was his table week and my dishes week.

  Remy put in the next morning hacking and grubbing to clear the underbrush out of some of the campsites along Cayuse Creek. Very few people ever come this far into the wilderness, but the Forestry Service has set up several camp places for them just in case, and Father had this area this summer. Any other year he'd be spending his time in his physics lab back with The Group, trying to find gadgets to help Outsiders do what The People do without gadgets.

  Anyway, Father released Remy after lunch and I talked him into going metal

  Sensing with me.

  "Shall I bring Father's bucket?" he teased. "It might be diamonds this time!"

  "Diamonds!" I wrinkled my nose at him. "I'm metal Sensing, goon-child. Even you know diamonds aren't metal!"

  I didn't do much Sensing on the way out, what with his chasing me over the ridge for my impertinence to my elders-he's a year older-and my chasing him up-creek for chasing me across the ridge. We were both laughing and panting by the time we got to the Chimneys.

  The Chimneys? "Wait-" I held out my hand and we stopped in mid-flight. "I just remembered. Remy, what's slender and shiny and not iron and complicated?"

  "What do you mean, slender? How slender? How complicated?" Remy sat cross-legged in the air beside me. "Is it a riddle?"

  "It's a riddle, all right, but I don't know the answer." And I told him all about it.

  "Well, let's go over and see," he said, his eyes shining, his ears fairly quivering with interest. "If it's something at the Selkirk, at least we know where it is." We started off again. "Can't you remember anything that'd give you any idea of its size?"

  "No-o-o," I said thoughtfully. "It could be most any size from a needle up to-up to-" I was measuring myself alongside my memory. "Gee, Remy! It could be higher than my head!"

  "And shiny?" he asked. "Not rusted?"

  "Shiny and not rusted."

  We were soon hovering over the old Selkirk mine, looking down on the tailings dump, the scant clutter of falling-apart shacks at the mine opening.

  "Somewhere there-" I started, when suddenly Remy caught me by the arm and we plummeted down like falling stars. I barely had time to straighten myself for landing before we were both staggering into the shelter of the aspens at the foot of the dump.

  "What on earth!" I began.

  "Hush!" Remy gestured violently. "Someone came out of the shack up there. An Outsider! You know we can't let Outsiders see us lifting! And we were right overhead!"

  "I didn't even know there was anyone in the area," I said.

  "No one has checked in since we got here this spring. Can you see them from here?"

  Remy threaded his way through the clump of aspen and was peering out dramatically, twining himself around the trunk of a tree that wasn't nearly big enough to hide him.

  "No," he said. "The hill hides him. Or them. I wonder how many there are."

  "Well, let's stop lurking like criminals and go up and see," I said. "It's only neighborly-"

  The trail up to the Selkirk was steep, rocky, and overgrown with brush and we were both panting when we got to the top.

  "Hi!" yelled Remy, "anybody home?" There was no answer except the squawk of a starred jay. "Hey!" he yelled again, "anyone here?"

  "Are you sure you saw someone?" I asked, "or is this another-"

  "Sure I saw someone!" Remy was headed for the sagging shack that drooped against the slope of the hill.

  It was too quick for me even to say a word to Remy. It would have been forever too late to try to reach him, so I just lifted his feet out from under him and sent him sprawling to the ground under the crazy paneless window of the shack. His yell of surprise and anger was wiped out by an explosive

  roar. The muzzle of a shotgun stabbed through the window, where smoke was eddying.

  "Git" came a tight, cold voice. "Git going back down that trail. There's plenty more buckshot where that came from."

  "Hey, wait a minute." Remy hugged the wall under the window. "We just came to

  see-"

  "That's what I thought." The gun barrel moved farther out. "Sneaking around. Prying-"

  "No," I said. "You don't yell 'hi' when you're sneaking. We just wondered who our neighbors were. We don't want to pry. If you'd rather, we'll go away. But we'd like to visit with you-" I could feel the tension lessening and saw the gun waver.

  "Doesn't seem like they'd send kids," the voice muttered, and a pale, old face wavered just inside the window. "You from the FBI?" the old man asked.

  "FBI"? Remy knelt under the window, his eyes topping the sill. "Heck, no. What would the FBI be wanting up here?" "Allen says the government-" He stopped and blinked. I caught a stab of sorrow from him that made me catch my breath. "Allen's my son," he said, struggling with some emotion or combination of emotions I hadn't learned to read yet.

  "Allen says nobody can come around, especially G-men-" He ran one hand through his heavy white hair. "You don't look like G-men."

  "We're not," I laughed. "You just ask your son."

  "My son?" The gun disappeared and I could hear the thump of the butt on the splintered old floor of the shack.

  "My son-" It was a carefully controlled phrase, but I could hear behind it a great soaring wall. "My son's busy," he said briskly. "And don't ask what's he doing. I won't tell you. Go on away and play. We got no time for kids."

  "We just wanted to say 'hi,'" I hastened before Remy could cloud up at being told to go play. "And to see if you need anything-"

  "Why should we need anything?" The voice was cold again and the muzzle of the gun came back up on the sill, not four inches from Remy's startled eyes. "I have the plans. Practically everything was ready-" Again the hinting stab of sorrow came from him and another wave of that mixture of emotions, so heavy a wave that it almost blinded me and the next thing I knew, Remy was helping me back down the trail. As soon as we were out of sight of the
shack, we lifted back to the aspen thicket. There I lay down on the wiry grass and, closing my eyes, I Channeled whatever the discomfort was, while Remy sat by sympathetically silent.

  "I wonder what he's so tender of up there," he finally said after I had sighed and sat up.

  "I don't know, but he's suffering from something. His thoughts don't pattern as they should. It's as though they were circling around and around a hard something he can't accept nor deny."

  "Something slender and shiny and complicated?" said Remy idly.

  "Well, yes," I said, casting back into my mind. "Maybe it does have something to do with that, but there's something really bad that's bothering him."

  "Well, then, let's figure out what that slender, shiny thing is, then maybe we can help him figure out that much-By the way, thanks for getting me out of range. I could have got perforated, but good-"

  "Oh, I don't know," I said. "I don't think he was really aiming at you."

  "Aiming or not, I sure felt drafty there when I saw what he was holding."

  I smiled and went on with the original topic. "If only we could get up closer," I said. "I'm not an expert at this Sensing stuff yet."

  "Well, try it anyway," said Remy. "Read it to me and I'll draw it and then we'll see what it is." He cleared a little space, shoving the aspen litter aside, and taking up a twig, held it poised.

  "I've studied hardly a thing about shapes yet," I said, lying back against the curve of the slope, "but I'll try." So I cleared my mind of everything and began to coax back the awareness of whatever the metal was at the Selkirk. I read it to Remy-all that metal so closely surrounded by the granite of the mountain and yet no intermingling! If you took away the metal there'd he nothing left but a tall, slender hole­

  My eyes flipped open. "The mine shaft!" I cried. "Whatever it is, it's filling the mine shaft-the one that goes straight down. All the drifts take off from there!"