Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  When the evening ended, each of us Old Ones carried not only the burden of the doom of the Home but a part of the past that, in the Quiet Place of each home, must, with the help of the Power, be probed and probed again, until—

  “Until—” The Oldest stood suddenly, clutching the table as though he had just realized the enormity of what he was saying. “Until we have the means of leaving the Home—before it becomes a band of dust between the stars—”

  Simon and Lytha were waiting up with ’Chell when David and I returned. At the sight of our faces, Simon slipped into the bedroom and woke Davie and the two crept quietly back into the room. Simon’s thought reached out ahead of him. Did he tell? And mine went out reassuringly. No. And he won’t.

  In spite of—or perhaps because of—the excitement that had been building up in me all evening, I felt suddenly drained and weak. I sat down, gropingly, in a chair and pressed my hands to my face. “You tell them, David,” I said, fighting an odd vertigo.

  David shivered and swallowed hard. “There were no foilova because the Home is being broken up. By next Gathering Day there will be no Home. It is being destroyed. We can’t even say why. We have forgotten too much and there isn’t time to seek out the information now, but long before next Gathering Day, we will be gone—out.”

  ’Chell’s breath caught audibly. “No Home!” she said, her eyes widening and darkening. “No Home? Oh, David, don’t joke. Don’t try to scare—”

  “It’s true.” My voice had steadied now. “It has been Seen. We must build ships and seek asylum among the stars.” My heart gave a perverse jump of excitement. “The Home will no longer exist. We will be homeless exiles.”

  “But the People away from the Home!” ’Chell’s face puckered, dose to tears. “How can we live anywhere else? We are a part of the Home as much as the Home is a part of us. We can’t just amputate—”

  “Father!” Lytha’s voice was a little too loud. She said again, “Father, are all of us going together in the same ship?”

  “No,” said David. “Each Group by itself.” Lytha relaxed visibly. “Our Group is to have six ships,” he added.

  Lytha’s hands tightened. “Who is to go in which ship?”

  “It hasn’t been decided yet,” said David, provoked. “How can you worry about a detail like that when the Home, the Home will soon be gone!”

  “It’s important,” said Lytha, flushing. “Timmy and I—”

  “Oh,” said David. “I’m sorry, Lytha. I didn’t know. The matter will have to be decided when the time comes.”

  It didn’t take long for the resiliency of childhood to overcome the shock of the knowledge born on Gathering Day. Young laughter rang as brightly through the hills and meadows as always. But David and ’Chell dung closer to one another, sharing the heavy burden of leave-taking, as did all the adults of the Home. At times I, too, felt wildly, hopefully, that this was all a bad dream to be awakened from. But other times I had the feeling that chis was an awakening. This was the dawn after a long twilight—a long twilight of slanting sun and relaxing shadows. Other times I felt so detached from the whole situation chat wonder welled up in me to see the sudden tears, the sudden clutching of familiar things, that had become a sort of pattern among us as realization came and went. And then, there were frightening times when I felt weakness flowing into me like a river—a river chat washed all the Home away on a voiceless wave. I was almost becoming more engrossed in the puzzle of me than in the puzzle of the dying Home—and I didn’t like it.

  David and I went often to Meeting, working with the rest of the Group on the preliminary plans for the ships. One night he leaned across the table to the Oldest and asked, “How do we know how much food will be needed to sustain us until we find asylum?”

  The Oldest looked steadily back at him. “We don’t know,” he said. “We don’t know that we will ever find asylum.”

  “Don’t know?” David’s eyes were blank with astonishment.

  “No,” said the Oldest. “We found no other habitable worlds before the Peace. We have no idea how far we will have to go or if we shall any of us live to see another Home. Each Group is to be assigned to a different sector of the sky. On Crossing Day, we say good-by—possibly forever—to all the other Groups. It may be that only one Ship will plant the seeds of the People upon a new world. It may be that we will all be Called before a new Home is found.”

  “Then,” said David, “why don’t we stay here and take our Calling with the Home?”

  “Because the Power has said to go. We are given time to go back to the machines. The Power is swinging the gateway to the stars open to us. We must take the gift and do what we can with it. We have no right to deprive our children of any of the years they might have left to them.”

  After David relayed the message to ’Chell, she clenched both her fists tight up against her anguished heart and cried, “We can’t! Oh, David! We can’t! We can’t leave the Home for—for—nowhere! Oh, David!” And she clung to him, wetting his shoulder with her tears.

  “We can do what we must do,” he said. “All of the People are sharing this sorrow, so none of us must make the burden any heavier for the others. The children learn their courage from us, ’Chell. Be a good teacher.” He rocked her close-pressed head, his hand patting her tumbled hair, his troubled eyes seeking mine.

  “Mother—” David began—Eva-lee was for every day.

  “Mother, it seems to me that the Presence is pushing us out of the Home deliberately and crumpling it like an empty eggshell so we can’t creep back into it. We have sprouted too few feathers on our wings since the Peace. I think we’re being pushed off the branch to make us fly. This egg has been too comfortable.” He laughed a little as he held ’Chell away from him and dried her cheeks with the palms of his hands. “I’m afraid I’ve made quite an omelet of my egg analogy, but can you think of anything really new that we have learned about Creation in our time?”

  “Well,” I said, searching my mind, pleased immeasurably to hear my own thoughts on the lips of my son. “No, I can honestly say I can’t think of one new thing.”

  “So if you were Called to the Presence right now and were asked, ‘What do you know of My Creation?’ all you could say would be ‘I know all that my Befores knew—my immediate Befores, that is—I mean, my father—’ ” David opened his hands and poured out emptiness. “Oh, Mother! What we have forgotten! And how content we have been with so little!”

  “But some other way,” ’Chell cried. “This is so—so drastic and cruel!”

  “All baby birds shiver,” said David, clasping her cold hands. “Sprout a pin feather, ’Chell!”

  And then the planning arrived at the point where work could begin. The sandal shops were empty. The doors were closed in the fabric centers and the ceramic workrooms. The sunlight crept unshadowed again and again across the other workshops, and weeds began tentative invasions of the garden plots.

  Far out in the surrounding hills, those of the People who knew how hovered in the sky, rolling back slowly the heavy green cover of the mountainsides, to lay bare the metal-rich underearth. Then the Old Ones, making solemn mass visits from Group to Group, quietly concentrated above the bared hills and drew forth from the very bones of the Home the bright, bubbling streams of metal, drew them forth until they flowed liquidly down the slopes to the workplaces—the launching sites. And the rush and the clamor and the noise of the hurried multitudes broke the silence of the hills of the Home and sent tremors through all our windows—and through our shaken souls.

  I often stood at the windows of our house, watching the sky-pointing monsters of metal slowly coming to form. From afar they had a severe sort of beauty that eased my heart of the hurt their having-to-be caused. But it was exciting! Oh, it was beautifully exciting! Sometimes I wondered what we thought about and what we did before we started all this surge out into space. On the days that I put in my helping hours on the lifting into place of the strange different parts that had been fa
shioned by other Old Ones from memories of the Befores, the upsurge of power and the feeling of being one part of such a gigantic undertaking, made me realize that we had forgotten without even being conscious of it, the warmth and strength of working together. Oh, the People are together even more than the leaves on a tree or the scales on a dolfeo, but working together? I knew this was my first experience with its pleasant strength. My lungs seemed to breathe deeper. My reach was longer, my grasp stronger. Odd, unfinished feelings welled up inside me and I wanted to do. Perhaps this was the itching of my new pin feathers. And then, sometimes when I reached an exultation that almost lifted me off my feet, would come the weakness, the sagging, the sudden desire for tears and withdrawal. I worried, a little, that there might come a time when I wouldn’t be able to conceal it.

  The Crossing had become a new, engrossing game for the children. At night, shivering in the unseasonable weather, cool, but not cold enough to shield, they would sit looking up at the glory-frosted sky and pick out the star they wanted for a new Home, though they knew that none they could see would actually be it. Eve always chose the brightest pulsating one in the heavens and claimed it as hers. Davie chose one that burned steadily but faintly straight up above them. But when Lytha was asked, she turned the question aside and I knew that any star with Timmy would be Home to Lytha.

  Simon usually sat by himself, a little withdrawn from the rest, his eyes quiet on the brightness overhead.

  “What star is yours, Simon?” I asked one evening, feeling intrusive but knowing the guard he had for any words he should not speak.

  “None,” he said, his voice heavy with maturity. “No star for me.”

  “You mean you’ll wait and see?” I asked.

  “No,” said Simon. “There won’t be one for me.”

  My heart sank. “Simon, you haven’t been Called, have you?”

  “No,” said Simon. “Not yet. I will see a new Home, but I will be Called from its sky.”

  “Oh, Simon,” I cried softly, trying to find a comfort for him. “How wonderful to be able to See a new Home!”

  “Not much else left to See,” said Simon. “Not that has words.” And I saw a flare of Otherside touch his eyes. “But, Gramma, you should see the Home when the last moment comes! That’s one of the things I have no words for.”

  “But we will have a new Home, then,” I said, going dizzily back to a subject I hoped I could comprehend. “You said—”

  “I can’t See beyond my Calling,” said Simon. “I will see a new Home. I will be Called from its strange sky. I can’t See what is for the People there. Maybe they’ll all be Called with me. For me there’s flame and brightness and pain—then the Presence. That’s all I know.

  “But, Gramma”—his voice had returned to that of a normal ten-year-old—“Lytha’s feeling awful bad. Help her.”

  The children were laughing and frolicking in the thin blanket of snow that whitened the hills and meadows, their clear, untroubled laughter echoing through the windows to me and ’Chell, who, with close-pressed lips, were opening the winter chests that had been closed so short a time ago. ’Chell fingered the bead stitching on the toes of one little ankle-high boot.

  “What will we need in the new Home, Eva-lee?” she asked despairingly.

  “We have no way of knowing,” I said. “We have no idea of what kind of Home we’ll find.” If any, if any, if any, our unspoken thoughts throbbed together.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said ’Chell. “What will it be like? Will we be able to live as we do now or will we have to go back to machines and the kind of times that went with our machines? Will we still be one People or be separated mind and soul?” Her hands clenched on a bright sweater and a tear slid down her cheek. “Oh, Eva-lee, maybe we won’t even be able to feel the Presence there!”

  “You know better than that!” I chided. “The Presence is with us always, even if we have to go to the ends of the Universe. Since we can’t know now what the new Home will be like, let’s not waste our tears on it.” I shook out a gaily patterned quilted skirt. “Who knows?” I laughed. “Maybe it will be a water world and we’ll become fish. Or a fire world and we the flames!”

  “We can’t adjust quite that much!” protested ’Chell, smiling moistly as she dried her face on the sweater. “But it is a comfort to know we can change some to match our environment.”

  I reached for another skirt and paused, hand outstretched.

  “ ’Chell,” I said, taken by a sudden idea, “what if the new Home is already inhabited? What if life is already there?”

  “Why then, so much the better,” said ’Chell. “Friends, help, places to live—”

  “They might not accept us,” I said.

  “But refugees—homeless!” protested ’Chell. “If any in need came to the Home—”

  “Even if they were different?”

  “In the Presence, all are the same,” said ’Chell.

  “But remember.” My knuckles whitened on the skirt. “Only remember far enough back and you will find the Days of Difference before the Peace.”

  And ’Chell remembered. She turned her stricken face to me. “You mean there might be no welcome for us if we do find a new Home?”

  “If we could treat our own that way, how might others treat strangers?” I asked, shaking out the scarlet skirt. “But, please the Power, it will not be so. We can only pray.”

  It turned out that we had little need to worry about what kind of clothing or anything else to take with us. We would have to go practically possessionless—there was room for only the irreducible minimum of personal effects. There was considerable of an uproar and many loud lamentations when Eve found out that she could not take all of her play—People with her, and, when confronted by the necessity of making a choice—one single one of her play-People—she threw them all in a tumbled heap in the corner of her room, shrieking that she would take none at all. A sharp smack of David’s hand on her bare thighs for her tantrum, and a couple of enveloping hugs for her comfort, and she sniffed up her tears and straightened out her play—People into a staggering, tumbling row across the floor. It took her three days to make her final selection. She chose the one she had named the Listener.

  “She’s not a him and he’s not a her,” she had explained. “This play—People is to listen.”

  “To what?” teased Davie.

  “To anything I have to tell and can’t tell anyone,” said Eve with great dignity. “You don’t even have to verbalize to Listener. All you have to do is to touch and Listener knows what you feel and it tells you why it doesn’t feel good and the bad goes away.”

  “Well, ask the Listener how to make the bad grammar go away,” laughed Davie. “You’ve got your sentences all mixed up.”

  “Listener knows what I mean and so do you!” retorted Eve.

  So when Eve made her choice and stood hugging Listener and looking with big solemn eyes at the rest of her play—People, Davie suggested casually, “Why don’t you go bury the rest of them? They’re the same as Called now and we don’t leave cast-asides around.”

  And from then until the last day, Eve was happy burying and digging up her play—People, always finding better, more advantageous, or prettier places to make her miniature casting-place.

  Lytha sought me out one evening as I leaned over the stone wall around the feather-pen, listening to the go-to-bed contented duckings and cooings. She leaned with me on the rough gray stones and, snapping an iridescent feather to her hand, smoothed her fingers back and forth along it wordlessly. We both listened idly to Eve and Davie. We could hear them talking together somewhere in the depths of the koomatka bushes beyond the feather-pen.

  “What’s going to happen to the Home after we’re gone?” asked Eve idly.

  “Oh, it’s going to shake and crack wide open and fire and lava will come out and everything will fall apart and burn up,” said Davie, no more emotionally than Eve.

  “Ooo!” said Eve, caught in the imag
ination. “Then what will happen to my play-People? Won’t they be all right under here? No one can see them.”

  “Oh, they’ll be set on fire and go up in a blaze of glory,” said Davie.

  “A blaze of glory!” Eve drew a long happy sigh. “In a blaze of glory! Inna blaza glory! Oh, Davie! I’d like to see it. Can I, Davie? Can I?”

  “Silly toola!” said Davie. “If you were here to see it, you’d go up in a blaze of glory, too!” And he lifted up from the koomatka bushes, the time for his chores with the animals hot on his heels.

  “Inna blaza glory! Inna blaza glory!” sang Eve happily. “All the play—People inna blaza glory!” Her voice faded to a tuneless hum as she left, too.

  “Gramma,” said Lytha, “is it really true?”

  “Is what really true?” I asked.

  “That the Home won’t be any more and that we will be gone.”

  “Why, yes, Lytha, why do you doubt it?”

  “Because—because—” She gestured with the feather at the wall. “Look, it’s all so solid—the stones set each to the other so solidly—so—so always-looking. How can it all come apart?”

  “You know from your first consciousness that nothing This-side is forever,” I said. “Nothing at all except Love. And even that gets so tangled up in the things of This-side that when your love is Called—“the memory of Thann was a heavy burning inside me—” Oh, Lytha! To look into the face of your love and know that Something has come apart and that never again This-side will you find him whole!”

  And then I knew I had said the wrong thing. I saw Lytha’s too young eyes looking in dilated horror at the sight of her love—her not-quite-yet love, being pulled apart by this same whatever that was pulling the Home apart. I turned the subject.

  “I want to go to the Lake for a good-by,” I said. “Would you like to go with me?”

  “No, thank you, Gramma.” Hers was a docile, little-girl voice—surely much too young to be troubled about loves as yet! “We teeners are going to watch the new metal-melting across the hills. It’s fascinating. I’d like to be able to do things like that.”