“Where are your shoes?” It was the first thing I could think of as I hunched beside her.
“Shoes?” She caught the picture from me. “Oh, shoes. My-sandals-are at the ship. I wanted to feel this world. We shield so much at home that I couldn’t tell you a thing about textures there. But the sand was so good the first night, and water is wonderful, I thought this black glowing smoothness and splinteredness would be a different sort of texture.” She smiled ruefully. “It is. It’s hot and-and-“
I supplied a word, “Hurty. I should think so. This shale flat heats up like a furnace this time of day. That’s why it’s called Furnace Flat.”
“I landed in the middle of it, running. I was so surprised that I didn’t have sense enough to lift or shield.”
“Let me see.” I loosened her fingers and took one of her slender white feet in my hand. “Adonday Veeah!” I whistled. Carefully I picked off a few loose flakes of bloodstained shale.
“You’ve practically blistered your feet, too. Don’t you know the sun can be vicious this time of day?”
“I know now.” She took her feet back and peered at the sole. “Look! There’s blood!”
“Yep. That’s usual when you puncture your skin. Better come on back to the house and get those feet taken care of.”
“Taken care of?”
“Sure. Antiseptic for the germs, salve for the burns. You won’t go hunting for a day or two. Not with your feet, anyway.”
“Can’t we just no-bi and transgraph? It’s so much simpler.”
“Indubitably,” I said, lifting sitting as she did and straightening up in the air above the path. “‘If I knew what you were talking about.” We headed for the house.
“Well, at Home the Healers-“
“This is Earth,” I said. “We have no Healers as yet. Only in so far as our Sensitive can help out those who know about healing. It’s mostly a do-it-yourself deal with us. And who knows, you might be allergic to us and sprout day lilies at every puncture. It’ll probably worry your mother-“
“Mother-” There was a curious pause. “Mother is annoyed with me already. She feels that I’m definitely undene. She wishes she’d left me Home. She’s afraid I’ll never be the same again.”
“Undene?” I asked, because Salla had sent out no clarification with the term.
“Yes,” she said, and I caught at visualization until light finally began to dawn.
“Well! We don’t exactly eat peas with our knives or wipe our noses on our sleeves! We can be pretty couth when we set our minds to it.”
“I know, I know,” she hastened to say, “but Mother-well, you know some mothers.”
“Yes, I know. But if you never walk or climb or swim or anything like that what do you do for fun?”
“It’s not that we never do them. But seldom casually and unthinkingly. We’re supposed to outgrow the need for childish activities like that. We’re supposed to be capable of more intellectual pleasures.”
“Like what?” I held the branches aside for her to descend to the kitchen door, and nearly kinked my shoulder trying to do that and open the door for her simultaneously. After several false starts and stops and a feeling of utter foolishness, like the one you get when you try to dodge past a person who tries to dodge past you, we ended up at the kitchen table with Salla gasping at the smart of the Merthiolate. “Like what?” I repeated.
“Hoosh! That’s quite a sensation.” She loosened her clutch on her ankles and relaxed under the soothing salve I spread on her reddened feet.
“Well, Mother’s favorite-and she does it very well-is Anticipating. She likes roses.”
“So do I,” I said, bewildered, “but I seldom Anticipate in connection with them.”
Salla laughed. I liked to hear her laugh. It was more nearly a musical phrase than a laugh. The Francher kid, the first time he heard it, made a composition of it. Of course neither he nor I liked it very much when the other kids in the Canyon, revved it up and used it for a dance tune, but I must admit it had quite a beat …. Well, anyway, Salla laughed.
“You know, for two people using the same words we certainly come out at different comprehensions. No-what Mother likes is Anticipating a rose. She chooses a bud that looks interesting-she knows all the finer distinctions-then she makes a rose, synthetic, as nearly like the real bud as she can. Then, for two or three days, she sees if she can anticipate every movement of the opening of the real rose by opening her synthetic simultaneously, or, if she’s very adept, just barely ahead of the other.” She laughed again. “It’s one of our family stories-the time she chose a bud that did nothing for two days, then shivered to dust. Somehow it had been sprayed with destro. Mother’s never quite got over the humiliation.”
“Maybe I’m being undene,” I said, “but I can’t see spending two days watching a rose bud.”
“And yet you spent a whole hour just looking at the sky last evening. And four of you spent hours last night receiving and displaying cards. You got quite emotional over it several times.”
“Umm-well, yes. But that’s different. A sunset like that, and the way Jemmy plays-” I caught the teasing in her eyes and we laughed together. Laughter needs no interpreter, at least not our laughter.
Salla took so much pleasure in sampling our world that, as is usual, I discovered things about our neighborhood I hadn’t known before. It was she who found the cave, became she was curious about the tiny trickle of water high on the slope of Baldy.
“Just a spring,” I told her as we looked up at the dark streak that marked a fold in the massive cliff.
“Just a spring,” she mocked. “In this land of little water is there such a thing as just a spring?”
“It’s not worth anything,” I protested, following her up into the air. “You can’t even drink from it.”
“It could ease a heart hunger, though. The sight of wetness in an arid land.”
“It can’t even splash,” I said as we neared the streak.
“No,” Salla said, holding her forefinger to the end of the moisture. “But it can grow things.” Lightly she touched the minute green plants that clung to the rock wall and the dampness.
“Pretty,” I said perfunctorily. “But look at the view from here.”
We turned around, pressing our backs to the sheer cliff, and looked out over the vast stretches of red-to-purple-to-blue ranges of mountains, jutting fiercely naked or solidly forested or speckled with growth as far as we could see. And lazily, far away, a shaft of smelter smoke rose and bent almost at right angles as an upper current caught it and thinned it to haze. Below, fold after fold of the hills hugged protectively to themselves the tiny comings and goings and dwelling places of those who had lost themselves in the vastness.
“And yet,” Salla almost whispered, “if you’re lost in vast enough vastness you find yourself-a different self, a self that has only Being and the Presence to contemplate.”
“True,” I said, breathing deeply of sun and pine and hot granite. “But not many reach that vastness. Most of us size our little worlds to hold enough distractions to keep us from having to contemplate Being and God.”
There was a moment’s deep silence as we let our own thoughts close the subject. Then Salla lifted and I started down.
“Hey!” I called. “That’s up!”
“I know it,” she called. “And that’s down! I still haven’t found the spring!”
So I lifted, too, grumbling at the stubbornness of women, and arrived even with Salla just as she perched tentatively on a sharp spur of rock on the edge of the vegetation-covered gash that was the beginning of the oozing wetness. She looked straight down the dizzy thousands of feet below us.
“What beautiful downness!” she said, pleasured.
“If you were afraid of heights-’”
She looked at me quickly. “Are some people? Really?”
“Some are. I read one, one time. Would you care to try the texture of that?” And I created for her the horrified frantic dying terror of an Outsider friend of mine who hardly dares look out of a second-story window.