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 she 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 remember 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.