The Anything Box

"But no!" cried Deci. "I lived. Death does not always come with theStrangers." Sudden anger roughened his voice. "It's the old ways! You want nochange! But all things change. It is the way of living things. Progress—"
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"All change is not progress," rumbled Tefu, his hands hiding his blindness.
"Like it or not," shouted Deci. 'Tomorrow the Strangers come! You have yourchoice, all of you!" His arm circled the crowd. "Keep to your homes like Peguor come forward with your devi and find with me a power, a richness—"
"Or move the coveti again," said Dobi. "Away from betrayal and foolishgreed. We have a third choice."
Deci caught his breath.
"Veti?" his whisper pleaded. "Veti? We do not need the rest of the coveti.You and I together. We can wait for the Strangers. Together we can have theworld. With this weapon not one person in this coveti or any other canwithstand us. We can be the new people. We can have our own coveti, and takewhat we want—anything, anywhere. Come to me, Veti."
Veti looked long into his eyes. "Why did you come back?" she whispered withtears in her voice. Then anger leaped into her eyes. "Why did you come back!"There was the force of a scream in her harsh words. She darted suddenly to therocks. She snatched the kiom from the dust where it had fallen. Before Devi knew what was happening, she whirled on him and pinned death upon his raggedjacket. Then with a swift, decisive twist, she tore away the pelu and droppedit to the dust.
Deci's eyes widened in terror, his hand clutched at the kiom but dared nottouch it.
"No!" he screamed. "No!"
Then Veti's eyes widened and her hands reached also for the kiom, but nopower she possessed could undo what she had done and her scream rose withDeci's.
Then knowing himself surely dead and dead unbeloved, already entering theeternity of darkness of the unlighted kiom, Deci crumpled to the ground. Underhis cheek was the hardness of the weapon, under his outflung hand, the beautyof the fabric, and the sunlight, bending through the water, giggled crazily onhis chin.
One dead unbeloved is not as much as a crushed flower by the path. For theflower at least there is regret for its ended beauty.
So knowing Deci dead, the coveti turned from him. There was for memory ofhim only an uncertainty to Veti's feet and a wondering shock in Veti's eyes asshe turned with the others to prepare to move the coveti.
The wind came and poured over the dust and the things and Deci.
And Deci lay waiting for his own breath to stop.
Turn the Page
When I was in the first grade, my teacher was magic. Oh, I know! Everyonethinks that his first teacher is something special. It's practically aconvention that all little boys fall in love with her and that all littlegirls imitate her and that both believe her the Alpha and Omega of wisdom—butmy teacher was really magic.
We all felt it the first day when finally the last anxious parent wasshooed reluctantly out the door and we sat stiff and uneasy in our hard,unfriendly chairs and stared across our tightly clasped hands at Miss Ebo,feeling truly that we were on the edge of something strange and wonderful, butmore wonderful than strange. Tears dried on the face of our weeper as wewaited in that moment that trembled like a raindrop before it splinters intorainbows.
"Let's be something!" Miss Ebo whispered. "Let's be birds."
And we were! We were! Real birds! We fluttered and sang and flitted fromchair to chair all around the room. We prinked and preened and smoothed ourheads along the brightness of feathers and learned in those moments the fiercethrobbing restlessness of birds, the feathery hushing quietness of sleepingwings. And there was one of us that beat endlessly at the closed windows,scattering feathers, shaking the glass, straining for the open sky.
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Then we were children again, wiggling with remembered delight, exchanging
pleased smiles, feeling that maybe school wasn't all fright and strangeness
after all. And with a precocious sort of knowledge, we wordlessly pledged our
mutual silence about our miracle.
This first day set the pace for us. We were, at different times, almost
every creature imaginable, learning of them and how they fitted into the world
and how they touched onto our segment of the world, until we saw fellow
creatures wherever we looked. But there was one of us who set himself against
the lessons and ground his heel viciously down on the iridescence of a green
June-bug that blundered into our room one afternoon. The rest of us looked at
Miss Ebo, hoping in our horror for some sort of cosmic blast from her. Her
eyes were big and knowing—and a little sad. We turned back to our work,
tasting for the first time a little of the sorrow for those who stubbornly
shut their eyes against the sun and still curse the darkness.
And soon the stories started. Other children heard about Red Riding Hood
and the Wolf and maybe played the parts, but we took turns at being Red Riding
Hood and the Wolf. Individually we tasted the terror of the pursued—the
sometimes delightfully delicious terror of the pursued—and we knew the blood
lust and endless drive of the pursuer—the hot pulses leaping in our veins, the
irresistible compulsion of hunger-never-satiated that pulled us along the
shadowy forest trails.
And when we were Red Riding Hood, we knew under our terror and despair that
help would come—had to come when we turned the page, because it was written
that way. If we were the Wolf, we knew that death waited at the end of our
hunger; we leaped as compulsively to that death as we did to our feeding. As
the mother and grandmother, we knew the sorrow of letting our children go, and
the helpless waiting for them to find the dangers and die of them or live
through them, but always, always, were we the pursuer or the pursued, the
waiter or the active one, we knew we had only to turn the page and finally
live happily ever after, because it was written that way! And we found out
that after you have once been the pursuer, the pursued and the watcher, you
can never again be only the pursuer or the pursued or the watcher. Ever after
you are a little of each of them.
We learned and learned in our first grade, but sometimes we had to stop our
real learning and learn what was expected of us. Those were the shallow days.
We knew the shallow days when they arrived because Miss Ebo met us at the
door, brightly smiling, cheerily speaking, but with her lovely dark eyes quiet
and uncommunicative. We left the door ajar and set ourselves to routine tasks.
We read and wrote and worked with our numbers, covering all we had slighted in
the magic days before—a model class, learning neat little lessons, carefully
catching up with the other first grades. Sometimes we even had visitors to
smile at our industry, or the supervisor to come in and sharply twitch a
picture to more exact line on the bulletin board, fold her lips in frustration
and make some short-tempered note in her little green book before she left us,
turning her stiff white smile on briefly for our benefit. And, at day's end,
we sighed with weariness of soul and burst out of class with all the unused
enthusiasm of the day, hoping that tomorrow would be magic again. And it