Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  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.

  But this was all the past—though sometimes I wonder if anything is ever past. It is the future I’m impatient for. Why, look at the area of international relations alone. Valancy could sit at the table at the next summit conference and read the truth behind all the closed wary sparring faces—truth naked and blinding as the glint of the moon on the edge of a metal door—opening—opening...

  I snatched myself to awareness. Someone was leaving the ship. I lifted a couple of inches off the sand and slid along quietly in the shadow. The figure came out, carefully, fearfully. The door swung shut and the figure straightened. Cautious step followed cautious step; then, in a sudden flurry of movement, the figure was running down the creek bed—fast! Fast! For about a hundred feet, and then it collapsed, face down into the sand.

  I streaked over and hovered. “Hi!” I said.

  Convulsively the figure turned over and I was looking down into her face. I caught her name—Salla.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked audibly.

  “No,” she thought. “No,” she articulated with an effort. “I’m not used to—” she groped, “running.” She sounded apologetic, not for being unused to running but for running. She sat up and I sat down. We acquainted each other with our faces, and I liked very much what I saw. It was a sort of restatement of Valancy’s luminously pale skin and dark eyes and warm lovely mouth. She turned away and I caught the faint glimmer of her personal shield.

  “You don’t need it,” I said. “It’s warm and pleasant tonight.”

  “But—” Again I caught the embarrassed apology.

  “Oh, surely not always!” I protested. “What a grim deal! Shields are only for emergencies!”

  She hesitated a moment and then the glimmer died. I caught the faint fragrance of her and thought ruefully that if I had a—fragrance—it was probably compounded of barnyard, lumber mill, and supper hamburgers.

  She drew a deep cautious breath. “Oh! Growing things! Life everywhere! We’ve been so long on the way. Smell it!”

  Obligingly I did, but was conscious only of a crushed manzanita smell from beneath the ship.

  This is a kind of an aside, because I can’t stop in my story at every turn and try to explain. Outsiders, I suppose, have no parallel for the way Salla and I got acquainted. Under all the talk, under all the activity and busy-ness in the times that followed, was a deep underflow of communication between us. I had felt this same type of awareness before when our in-gathering brought new members of the Group to the Canyon, but never quite so strongly as with Salla. It must have been more noticeable because we lacked many of the common experiences that are shared by those who have occupied the same earth together since birth. That must have been it.

  “I remember,” Salla said as she sifted sand through slender unused-looking hands, “when I was very small I went out in the rain.” She paused, as though for a reaction. “Without my shield,” she amplified. Again the pause. “I got wet!” she cried, determined, apparently, to shock me.

  “Last week,” I said, “I walked in the rain and got so wet that my shoes squelched at every step and the clean taste of rain was in my mouth. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. There’s something so quiet about rain. Even when there’s wind and thunder there’s a stillness about it. I like it.”

  Then, shaken by hearing myself say such things aloud, I sifted sand, too, a little violently at first.

  She reached over with a slender milky finger and touched my hand. “Brown,” she said. Then, “Tan,” as she caught my thought.

  “The sun,” I said. “We’re out in the sun so much, unshielded, that it browns our skins or freckles them, or burns the living daylight out of us if we’re not careful.”

  “Then you still live in touch of Earth. At Home we seldom ever—” Her words faded and I caught a capsuled feeling that might have been real cozy if you were born to it, but...

  “How come?” I asked. “What’s with your world that you have to shield all the time?” I felt a pang for my pictured Eden....

  “We don’t have to. At least not any more. When we arrived at the new Home we had to do a pretty thorough renovating job. We—of course this was my grandparents—wanted it as nearly like the old Home as possible. We’ve done wonderfully well copying the vegetation and hills and valleys and streams, but—” guilt tinged her words, “it’s still a copy—nothing casual and—and thoughtless. By the time the new Home was livable, we’d got into the habit of shielding. It was just what one did automatically. I don’t believe Mother has gone unshielded outside her own sleep-room in all her life. You just—don’t—”

  I sprawled my arm across the sand, feeling it grit against my skin. Real cozy, but...

  She sighed. “One time—I was old enough to know better, they told me—one time I walked in the sun unshielded. I got muddy and got my hands dirty and tore my dress.” She brought out the untidy words with an effort, as though using extreme slang at a very prim gathering. “And I tangled my hair so completely in a tree that I had to pull some of it out to get free.” There was no bravado in her voice now. Now she was sharing with me one of the most precious of her memories—one not quite socially acceptable among her own.

  I touched her hand lightly, since I do not communicate too freely without contact, and saw her.

  She was stealing out of the house before dawn—strange house, strange landscape, strange world—easing the door shut, lifting quickly out into the grove below the house. Her flame of rebellion wasn’t strange to me, though. I knew it too well myself. Then she dropped her shield. I gasped with her because I was feeling, as newly as though I were the First in a brand-new Home, the movement of wind on my face, on my arms. I was even conscious of it streaming like tiny rivers between my fingers. I felt the soil beneath my hesitant feet, the soft packed clay, the outline of a leaf, the harsh stab of gravel, the granular sandiness of the water’s edge. The splash of water against my legs was as sharp as a bite into lemon. And wetness! I had no idea that wetness was such an individual feeling. I can’t remem
ber when first I waded in water, or whether I ever felt wetness to know consciously, “This is wetness.” The newness! It was like nothing I’d felt before.

  Then suddenly there was the smell of crushed manzanita again, and Salla’s hand had moved from beneath mine.

  “Mother’s questing for me,” she whispered. “She has no idea I’m here. She’d have a quanic if she knew. I must go before she gets no answer from my room.”

  “When are you all coming out?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. Laam will have to rest longer. He’s our Motiver, you know. It was exhausting bringing the ship into the atmosphere. More so than the whole rest of the trip. But the rest of us—”

  “How many?” I whispered as she glided away from me and up the curve of the ship.

  “Oh,” she whispered back, “there’s—” The door opened and she slid inside and it closed.

  “Dream sweetly,” I heard soundlessly, then astonishingly, the touch of a soft cheek against one of my cheeks, and the warm movement of lips against the other. I was startled and confused, though pleased, until with a laugh I realized that I had been caught between the mother’s questing and Salla’s reply.

  “Dream sweetly,” I thought, and rolled myself in my blankets.

  Something wakened me in the empty hours before dawn. I lay there feeling snatched out of sleep like a fish out of water, shivering in the interval between putting off sleep and putting on awakeness.

  “I’m supposed to think,” I thought dully. “Concentrated thinking.”

  So I thought. I thought of my People, biding their time, biding their time, waiting, waiting, walking when they could be flying. Think, think, what we could do if we stopped waiting and really got going. Think of Bethie, our Sensitive, in a medical center, reading the illnesses and ailments to the doctors. No more chance for patients to hide behind imaginary illnesses. No wrong diagnoses, no delay in identification of conditions. Of course there are only one Bethie and the few Sorters we have who could serve a little less effectively, but it would be a beginning.

  Think of our Sorters, helping to straighten people out, able to search their deepest beings and pry the scabs off ancient cankers and wounds and let healing into the suffering intricacies of the mind.

  Think of our ability to lift, to transport, to communicate, to use Earth instead of submitting to it. Hadn’t Man been given dominion over Earth? Hadn’t he forfeited it somewhere along the way? Couldn’t we help point him back to the path again?

  I twisted with this concentrated restatement of all my questions. Why couldn’t this all be so now, now!

  But, “No,” say the Old Ones. “Wait,” says Jemmy. “Not now,” says Valancy.

  “But look!” I wanted to yell. “They’re headed for space! Trying to get there on a Pogo stick. Look at Laam! He brought that ship to us from some far Homeland without lifting his hand, without gadgets in his comfortable motive-room. Take any of us. I myself could lift our pickup high enough to need my shield to keep me breathing. I’ll bet even I in one of those sealed high-flying planes could take it to the verge of space, just this side of the escape rim. And any Motiver could take it over the rim and the hard part is over. Of course, though all of us can lift we have only two Motivers, but it would be a start!”

  But, “No,” say the Old Ones. “Wait,” says Jemmy. “Not now,” says Valancy.

  All right, so it would be doing violence to the scheme of things, grafting a third arm onto an organism designed for two. So the Earth ones will develop along our line someday—look at Peter and Dita and that Francher kid and Bethie. So someday when it is earned they will have it. So—let’s go, then! Let’s find another Home. Let’s take to space and leave them their Earth. Let’s let them have their time—if they don’t die of it first. Let’s leave. Let’s get out of this crummy joint. Let’s go somewhere where we can be ourselves all the time, openly, unashamed!

  I pounded my fists on the blanket, then ruefully wiped the flecks of sand from my lips and tongue and grunted a laugh at myself. I caught my breath, then relaxed.

  “Okay, Davy,” I said, “what are you doing out so early?”

  “I haven’t been to bed,” Davy said, drifting out of the shadows. “Dad said I could try my scriber tonight. I just got it finished.”

  “That thing?” I laughed up at him. “What could you scribe at night?”

  “Well—” Davy sat down in the air above my blanket, rubbing his thumbs on the tiny box he was holding. “I thought it might be able to scribe dreams, but it won’t. Not enough verbalizing in them. I checked my whole family and used up half my scribe tape. Gotta make some more today!”

  “Nasty break,” I said. “Back to the drawing boards, boy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Davy said. “I tried it on your dreams—” He flipped up out of my casual swipe at him. “But I couldn’t get anything. So I ran a chill down your spine—”

  “You rat,” I said, too lazy to resent it very much. “That’s why I woke up so hard and quick.”

  “Yup,” he said, drifting back over me. “So I tried it on you awake. More concentrated thought patterns.”

  “Hey!” I sat up slowly. “Concentrated thought?”

  “Take this last part.” Davy drifted up again. There was a quacking gabble. “Ope!” he said. “Forgot the slowdown. Thoughts are fast. Now—”

  And dearly and minutely, the way a voice sometimes sounds from a telephone receiver, I heard myself yelling, “Let’s leave, let’s get out of this crummy joint—”

  “Davy!” I yelled, launching myself upward, encumbered as I was with blankets.

  “Watch it! Watch it!” he cried, holding the scriber away from me as we tumbled in the air. “Group interest! I claim Group interest! With the ship here now—”

  “Group interest, nothing!” I said as I finally got my hands on the scriber. “You’re forgetting privacy of thought—and the penalty for violation thereof.” I caught his flying thought and pushed the right area on the box to erase the record.

  “Dagnab!” said Davy, disgruntled. “My first invention and you erase my first recording on it.”

  “Nasty break!” I said. Then I tossed the box to him. “But say!” I reached up and pulled him down to me. “Obla! Think about Obla and this screwy gadget!”

  “Yeah!” His face lighted up, then blanked as he was snatched along by the train of thought. “Yeah! Obla—no audible voice—” He had already forgotten me before the trees received him.

  It wasn’t that I had been ashamed of my thoughts. It was only that they sounded so—so naked, made audible. I stood there, my hands flattened against the beautiful ship, and felt my conviction solidify. “Let’s go. Let’s leave. If there isn’t room for us on this ship, we can build others. Let’s find a real Home somewhere. Either find one or build one.”

  I think it was at that moment that I began to say good-by to Earth, almost subconsciously beginning to sever the ties that bound me to it. Like the slow out-fanning of a lifting wing, the direction of my thoughts turned skyward. I lifted my eyes. “This time next year,” I thought, “I won’t be watching morning lighting up Old Baldy.”

  By midmorning the whole of the Group, including the whole Group from Bendo, which had been notified, was waiting on the hillside near the ship. There was very little audible speech and not much gaiety. The ship brought back too much of the past, and the dark streams of memory were coursing through the Group. I latched onto one stream and found only the shadows of the Crossing in it. “But the Home,” I interjected, “the Home before!”

  Just then a glitter against the bulk of the ship drew our attention. The door was opening. There was a pause, and then there were the four of them, Salla and her parents and another older fellow. The slight glintings of their personal shields were securely about them, and, as they winced against the downpouring sun, their shields thickened above their heads and took on a deep blue tint.

  The Oldest, his blind face turned to the ship, spoke on a Group stream.


  “Welcome to the Group.” His thought was organ-toned and cordial. “Thrice welcome among us. You are the first from the Home to follow us to Earth. We are eager for the news of our friends.”

  There was a sudden babble of thoughts. “Is Anna with you? Is Mark? Is Santhy? Is Bediah?”

  “Wait, wait—” The Father lifted his arms imploringly. “I cannot answer all of you at once except by saying—there are only the four of us in the ship.”

  “Four!” The astonished thought almost lifted an echo from Baldy.

  “Why, yes,” answered—he gave us his name—Shua. “My family and I and our Motiver here, Laam.”

  “Then all the rest—?” Several of us slipped to our knees with the Sign trembling on our fingers.

  “Oh, no! No!” Shua was shocked. “No, we fared very well in our new Home. Almost all your friends await you eagerly. As you remember, ours was the group living adjacent to yours on the Home. Our Group and two others reached our new Home. Why, we brought this ship empty so we could take you all Home!”

  “Home?” For a stunned moment the word hung almost visibly in the air above us.

  Then, “Home!” The cry rose and swelled and broke to audibility as the whole Group took to the sky as one. It was such a jubilant ecstatic cry that it shook an echo sufficient to frighten a pair of blue jays from a clump of pines on the flat.

  “Why, they must all think the way I do!” I thought, astonished, as I joined in the upsurge and the jubilant chorus of the wordless Homeward song. Then I flatted a little as I wondered if any of them shared with me the sudden pang I had felt before. I tucked it quickly away, deep enough so that only a Sorter would be able to find it, and quickly cradled the Francher kid in my lifting—he hadn’t learned to go much beyond the treetops yet, and the Group was leaving him behind....

  “There’s four of them,” I thought breathlessly at Obla. “Only four. They brought the ship to take us Home.”