“Oh, no!” She paled and clung to the scanty draping of vines and branches of the cleft. “No more! No more!”
“I’m sorry. But it is a different sort of emotion. I think of it every time I read-‘neither height nor depth nor any other creature.’ Height to my friend is a creature-a horrible hovering destroyer waiting to pounce on him.”
“It’s too bad;’ Salla said, “that he doesn’t remember to go on to the next phrase, and learn to lose his fear-“
By quick common consent we switched subjects in midair.
“This is the source,” I said. “Satisfied?”
“No.” She groped among the vines. “I want to see a trickle trickle, and a drop drop from the beginning.” She burrowed deeper.
Rolling my eyes to heaven for patience, I helped her hold back the vines. She reached for the next layer-and suddenly wasn’t there.
“Salla!” I scrabbled at the vines. “Salla!”
“H-h-here,” I caught her subvocal answer.
“Talk!” I said as I felt her thought melt out of my consciousness.
“I am talking!” Her reply broke to audibility on the last word. “And I’m sitting in some awfully cold wet water. Do come in.” I squirmed cautiously through the narrow cleft into the darkness and stumbled to my knees in icy water almost waist-deep.
“It’s dark,” Salla whispered, and her voice ran huskily around the place.
“Wait for your eyes to change,” I whispered back, and, groping through the water, caught her hand and clung to it. But even after a breathless sort of pause our eyes could not pick up enough light to see by-only faint green shimmer where the cleft was.
“Had enough?” I asked. “Is this trickly and drippy enough?” I lifted our hands and the water sluiced off our elbows.
“I want to see,” she protested.
“Matches are inoperative when they’re wet. Flashlight have I none. Suggestions?’”
“Well, no. You don’t have any Glowers living here, do you?”
“Since the word rings no bell, I guess not. But, say!” I dropped her hand and, rising to my knees, fumbled for my pocket. “Dita taught me—or tried to after Valancy told her how come—” I broke off, immersed in the problem of trying to get a hand into and out of the pocket of skin-tight wet Levi’s.
“I know I’m an Outlander,” Salla said plaintively, “but I thought I had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of your language.”
“Dita’s the Outsider that we found with Low. She’s got some Designs and Persuasions none of us have. There!” I grunted, and settled back in the water. “Now if I can remember.”
I held the thin dime between my fingers and shifted all those multiples of mental gears that are so complicated until you work your way through their complexity to the underlying simplicity. I concentrated my whole self on that little disc of metal. There was a sudden blinding spurt of light. Salla cried out, and I damped the light quickly to a more practical level.
“I did it!” I cried. “I glowed it first thing, this time! It took me half an hour last time to get a spark!”
Salla was looking in wonder at the tiny globe of brilliance in my hand. “‘And an Outsider can do that?”
“Can do!” I said, suddenly very proud of our Outsiders.
“And so can I, now! There you are, ma’am,” I twanged. “Yore light, yore cave-look to yore little heart’s content.”
I don’t suppose it was much as caves go. The floor was sand, pale, granular, almost sugarlike. The pool-out of which we both dripped as soon as we sighted dry land-had no apparent source, but stayed always at the same level in spite of the slender flow that streaked the cliff. The roof was about twice my height and the pool was no farther than that across. The walls curved protectively close around the water. At first glance there was nothing special about the cave. There weren’t even any stalactites or stalagmites-just the sand and the quiet pool shimmering a little in the light of the glowed coin.
“Well!” Salla sighed happily as she pushed back her heavy hair with wet hands. “This is where it begins.”
“Yes.” I closed my hand around the dime and watched the light spray between my fingers. “Wetly, I might point out.”
Salla was scrambling across the sand on all fours.
“It’s high enough to stand,” I said, following her.
“I’m being a cave creature,” she smiled back over her shoulder. “Not a human surveying a kingdom. It looks different from down here.”
“Okay, troglodyte. How does it look down there?”
“Marvelous!” Salla’s voice was very soft; “Bring the light and look!”
We lay on our stomachs and peered into the tiny tunnel, hardly a foot across, that Salla had found. I focused the light down the narrow passageway. The whole thing was a lacy network of delicate crystals, white, clear, rosy and pale green, so fragile that I held my breath lest they break. The longer I looked the more wonder I saw-miniature forests and snowflakelike laciness, flights of fairy steps, castles and spires, flowers terraced up gentle hill sides and branches of blossoms almost alive enough to sway. An arm’s length down the tunnel a quietly bright pool reflected the perfection around it to double the enchantment.
Salla and I looked at each other, our faces so close together that we were mirrored in each other’s eyes-eyes that stated and reaffirmed: Ours-no one else in all the universe shares this spot with us.
Wordlessly we sat back on the sand. I don’t know about Salla, but I was having a little difficulty with my breathing, because, for some odd reason, it seemed necessary to hold my breath to shield from being as easily read as a child.
“Let’s leave the light,” Salla whispered. “It’ll stay lighted without you, won’t it?”
“Yeah. Indefinitely.”
“Leave it by the little cave. Then we’ll know it’s always lighted and lovely.”
We edged our way out of the cleft in the cliff and hovered there for a minute, laughing at our bedraggled appearance. Then we headed for home and dry clothes.
“I wish Obla could see the cave,” I said impulsively. Then wished I hadn’t because I caught Salla’s immediate displeased protest.
“I mean,” I said awkwardly, “she never gets to see-” I broke off. After all she wouldn’t be able to see any better if she were there. I would have to be her eyes.
“Obla.” Salla wasn’t vocalizing now. “She’s very near to you.”
“She’s almost my second self.”
“A relative?”
“No. Only as souls are related.”
“I can feel her in your thoughts so often. And yet-have I ever met her?”
“No. She doesn’t meet people.” I was holding in my mind the clean uncluttered strength of Obla; then again I caught Salla’s distressed protest and her feeling of being excluded, before she shielded. Still I hesitated. I didn’t want to share. Obla was more an expression of myself than a separate person. An expression that was hidden and precious. I was afraid to share-afraid that it might be like touching a finger to a fragile chemical fern in the little tunnel, that there wouldn’t even be a ping before the perfection shivered to a shapeless powder.
Two weeks after the ship arrived a general Group meeting was called. We all gathered on the flat around the ship. It looked like a field day at first, with the flat filled with laughing lifting children playing tag above the heads of the more sedate elders. The kids my age clustered at one side, tugged toward playing tag, too, but restrained because after all you do outgrow some things-when people are looking. I sat there with them, feeling an emptiness beside me. Salla was with her parents.
The Oldest was not there. He was at home struggling to contain his being in the broken body that was becoming more and more a dissolving prison. So Jemmy called us to attention.