“Let’s go to the drawing sand,” he said and when she nodded again, he crawled over to a space toward the cave mouth where the light was brighter. Moms took Echo’s hand and they joined him and Moms sat beside Echo, to be near and reassure her.
This space was a circle about four feet in diameter. Vern had cleared away the pebbles and smoothed the floor and brought fine sand from the bottom of the stream and poured it and spread it out. This was where they wrote and drew and Moms taught Vern mathematics and geometry and a little geography. Here too Echo and Vern drew the pictures that came into Echo’s mind. Echo had many words in her head, but she could not order them into concepts; she could not abstract. Her world was made up of separate, individual things that could be, and sometimes had to be, placed in rote positions. She had no categories to put things into. Queenie did not belong to the family of dogs; she belonged to the family of Queenie and there were no other members. For all the masses of words heaped in her capacious, seemingly unlimited memory, Echo could not know what a word was.
It made everything extremely difficult, for she was their best detector of the Olders. She could hear sounds as acutely as Queenie, perhaps, and she could see even better, for the dog was less receptive to color. As for odors, there Queenie had it all over the girl. Queenie was particularly sensitive to the Old Ones’ smell and if it became too strong she was uncontrollable, yelping and howling and snapping. She might bite even Vern in her terror.
“Let’s draw how dirt is broken,” Vern said. “Show me how.” He took up the curved stick lying by the sand circle and held it in his right hand. It was a slightly arced, two-foot length of a sapling maple branch he had trimmed and sharpened.
It took some time before Echo would touch him, but at last she laid her small, porcelain- like hand on the back of his wrist and with slight but not tentative movements began to guide. The marks she directed Vern to make were incomprehensible, but he had learned to wait for the process to conclude. First a mark here by her knee, then one over there so that he had to lean to make it and then one to the left almost out of the circle. Vern could not draw things in that way himself and he was always surprised when the marks joined together to form an image.
This time the picture would be of Broken Dirt, whatever that might be, but when Echo took her hand from his wrist and snuggled her face into Moms’s shoulder, he thought that she must not have finished the picture and had given up. He had been struck by this fear before, that Echo was only making random scratches. She never closed her eyes to concentrate. It was as if she saw an image already in the sand and was merely tracing it out. So he leaned close and studied.
It was not a picture of an animal or a person or of one of the Olders. Echo could not have drawn one of the latter without crying out in terror and retreating into herself for a long time. It was no machine that Vern could puzzle out; the lines were too far apart. Maybe it was some building or monument the Olders had constructed or that they were constructing now. They were always busy, always remaking the world around them into something it should not be, something that made Vern queasy when he saw it. Echo’s picture was of nothing that plied through the sky like the monstrous flying machines that whispered back and forth in the upper air on unguessable errands.
Maybe it was something in the stream. There was a wavy line between two sets of straight- line segments that were joined. There were squiggly circles and lines disposed about the line-segments. He peered more closely at the wavy line between the segment sets; it was broken in two places with small empty spaces.
Echo was watching him look, her face expressionless. When he pointed at one of the broken places and asked, “Is it a waggly?” she buried her face in Moms’ shoulder. Then she looked out again to watch him examine it.
So, whatever, the hiatus indicated, it was not something that flapped or waved or fluttered in the breeze. Those irregular movements fascinated Echo; they were to her the salient parts of any landscape.
“Is it a too-bright?”
Echo rocked back and forth, excited, but she did not smile.
A too-bright would be something that flashed or glittered or glimmered. There were two of them, so it probably wouldn’t be something that emitted a steady shine as an artificial light would probably do. What things in nature flashed or flickered intermittently?
Well, it was a stream, of course, or a river. When the three of them went to bathe in the stream in the warm summer, the thing that captured Echo’s attention most firmly was the way the sunlight reflected off the wavelets. She was transfixed, watching these changing lights as fixedly as if she were trying to decipher a code.
So then, if the wavy line were a stream, the surrounding segments would represent the banks. The squiggly circles and other lines would represent bushes and grasses.
Except that Echo could not “represent” with abstract symbols. She always guided Vern’s hand to draw, as closely as the sand-medium would allow, the exact lineaments of the thing to be seen. So his interpretation must be wrong and these disjointed marks composed a realistic picture of something he could not recognize.
Or —
Or maybe it was a true-to-life drawing of the picture that was in her mind. Maybe it had come to her just as it was laid out here in the sand, a schematic diagram of a place. In that case, it must have been sent to her as a message — and not from the Olders or any of their slaves. Their aura about it would ravage his sister. She would crouch with her face to the cave wall, clutching her knees and wailing.
He looked at her, safe in Moms’ arms, watching him. She was not frightened. The message had come from something or someone else than they knew, an entity that had searched to find a receptive mind and had encountered Echo. This was not the first of her extrasensory episodes. Such experiences had been remarked as fairly widespread among autistics, even before the advent of the Olders had heightened, in greater and less degree, according to individuals, those powers among humans. Some person, or group of persons, was trying to make contact, either with Echo alone or with the whole family by means of Echo.
He examined the drawing again. Was he looking at a map? Did these scattered lines represent a specific place? He could not ask. “Place” would mean nothing to Echo. If she arrived at the location suggested by her drawing, she almost certainly would not be able to recognize it. It would be too detailed and, to her, would bear no resemblance to the lines in the sand.
Well then, supposing that this telepathic being, whatever it might be, really had transmitted a map to Echo’s mind, and, supposing that Vern had interpreted the hiatuses in the wavy line correctly, how would the sender have known to include a representation of a “too-bright” in the scheme? The telepath would have to know her mind thoroughly, understanding the way Echo experienced things and reacted to them. But that would not be possible without her knowledge and if she had felt someone rummaging through her mind-pictures, her fear and trembling would alert her mother and brother.
If, however, the telepath understood the kind of mind it had touched, it would not need intimate knowledge of its contact. If she or he or it recognized autism and had had previous commerce with autistic personalities, it would know how to contact them and how to communicate information without distressing that person. Echo had been disturbed; she had murmured in her sleep, reacting to the encounter, but she had not been distressed. The telepath was not immediately threatening. But the further intentions might not be benevolent.
Now, supposing that his first two notions were not groundless, the situation would be that some being had made purposeful contact with the family, or at least with Echo, and had transmitted a map, though one with limited geographical information. Perhaps it had transmitted only as much as it estimated that Echo could receive and pass on.