But it was about the time that Reuben turned twelve that three things happened to him. His leg was almost completely better. His chest and groin began growing hair. And he began to have flashes of what people thought.
It was then that the stranger came to Worthing Farm.
He was short, and dressed in clothing that seemed like another skin, only dark brown. Reuben, Matthew, father, and Jacob were hoeing the potatoes when he stepped from the forest. How he had got through the barrier no one knew. But he was strange, he was from outside, and he must be terribly powerful.
Reuben could not control his gift yet — but he did manage to catch glimpses. They were frightening. He saw images of great halls and huge towers, the world like a little ball in the distance, men and women in strange clothing doing strange things. He heard words and sentences that had no meaning, but that sounded vaguely wondrous, and also menacing. And he understood something else: this stranger was a man of power, a man of might, a man who was used to ruling other men.
He was everything that Reuben had learned to hate and fear from outside. And almost at the same time that Reuben realized that, father and Matthew and Jacob silently picked up their bronze–headed hoes and raised them high and advanced on the stranger.
Later, Reuben could not remember if the man had spoken or not. He only knew that the man looked coldly at them, and turned and walked back toward the barrier. Don't let him get away! Reuben silently shouted, and the others thought the same thing, because they ran to catch the man, kill him before he could get away and come back with more men with such frightening minds and such calm, confident power. But the man reached the edge, fiddled with something in his hands, and stepped easily through the barrier.
At the cleared space the men stopped, wordlessly watching as the stranger calmly walked back into the forest. When he was out of sight, they came away from the barrier, shaking with fear as they always did when the barrier was too close, too long.
They said little about the incident. Reuben assumed they didn't want to tell the women and worry them. But grandma looked at them all carefully at dinner, and asked, "What is it you're not telling me?"
And father smiled and answered, "Why don't you look behind my eyes and see?"
Grandma reached over and slapped his face, lightly. "I said tell me."
And so they told her about the stranger. When they were done, she leaped to her feet. "And you waited to mention this until now! I've raised fools for sons, but I had no idea how foolish!" And she ran out of the house. Soon came the roaring of the light house, and she was gone.
They assumed she'd be back soon, but she never came.
Reuben grew up and married his Uncle Henry's youngest daughter, Mary, and all their sons had bright blue eyes, and all of them, at puberty, could look behind each other's eyes and see each other's heart. Nothing else of importance happened to Reuben; he lived out his life within the confines of the farm, and grew old, and saw his great grandchildren born.
One day, however, when he was very, very old, he went to the barrier alone, and stood there for a very long time. He wasn't sure why he had come. But finally, in order to ease the longing, he reached out his hand into the space where the barrier had always been.
And felt nothing.
He took a step forward, and still felt nothing. And another step, and another, and he was completely through the barrier to the other side, and had felt no pain, nothing at all.
He touched a tree on the other side. It felt like any other tree. The sky looked normal enough. And the leaves crunched underfoot just the same.
And then he walked back through the barrier, and fled back to his tiny room at the back of the old house, and stayed there, trembling, for an hour. He told no one of what he had found. But from that day on, he made his son Simon lead the Walk, and Reuben stayed away from the barrier for the rest of his life.
He was buried with his head pointing toward the Worthingstone.
17
JASON WORTHING awoke from somec for the hundredth time within the pilot's cabin of the starship. But now he no longer exercised — it was all he could do to get out and walk around, force the blood to flow. He had long since ceased wondering how old he really was — he looked not older than forty, and felt ninety–nine. For three centuries the responsibility for a world had been on his shoulders; for forty years since then, he had been wakened every year or so to talk to Arran when she flew the scoutship from the farm to the starship. He assumed, when he got up, that it was she whose coming had roused him.
But the voice that spoke to him as he stood, flexing his arms beside the coffin, was a man's voice, and Jason looked up in shock.
The man was fairly old, but dressed in Empire fashions, though the color combinations were strange to Jason. And the old man laughed as he saw Jason's puzzlement. Jason looked into the stranger's mind, and then laughed.
"Abner Doon!" he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "I'd long since given up any hope! Abner Doon!"
And the old man embraced him. "Sweaty, aren't you," Doon commented.
"And still making a virtue out of discourtesy, I see," Jason said.
And they sat and looked at each other for a while. Finally Jason laughed again. "You know, I kept expecting any time, after the first hundred years here, that you'd turn up someday. I think I was still hanging on to some hope of that. What kept you?"
"Oh, things, you know. The revolution took a bit longer than I had expected to foment, that kind of thing. People are so damned unpredictable."
"I know," Jason said. They sat in silence for a moment.
"Oh, by the way," Boon said. "I took some liberties. I read all the Histories you've got stashed in here — fascinating reading. And the wreckage in the back of the ship here is self–explanatory. So instead of waking you and wasting your time on a guided tour, I made a few visits around your little planet."
"And is everything up to snuff?"
"Going nicely. You'll be interested to know that Wien's group — Wien's dead, by the way — made it to the lake without much trouble, and there's a magnificent little bronze–age town growing up along the shores, with farms spreading all over. And Noyock's quite ambitious — he's already sent colonists to five of the major islands. You've accomplished a great deal. A planet with no metals, and you've created a stable, religious society, progressive, well–governed, peaceful, knowledgeable — my congratulations."
Jason nodded, smiling.
Doon moved in for the kilclass="underline" "So what the hell are you doing with that miserable little farm in the middle of the Forest of Waters?"
"Oh," Jason said. "You went there."
"Yes, I went there, and they damn near killed me before I got away. That's when I decided to come back here and wake you up. That farm is the opposite of everything else you've done — everywhere else, poets, music, a chance for a totally nontechnological culture of real beauty and refinement. And on that farm, everyone suspicious, murderous, ignorant, and hemmed in by the strongest damn mindshield I've ever had the misfortune to bypass."
"Well," Jason said, "that's my showcase."
Doon snorted. "Papa's pride and joy."
"Exactly."
Boon looked up, startled. "You don't mean it!"
"Didn't you see their eyes?"
"I didn't come close enough. You mean that's your family?"
"That's where my genes are being stored. Inbred. There's a very small chance that a few idiots will start turning up after a while. But in the meantime, they're going to be getting my genes from every parent for a few generations."
Doon looked disturbed. Angry. He got up and walked to the control board. "Dammit, Jason! That's terrible. I mean, it's fine to want to improve the strain — but inbreeding like that can cause real harm. You just don't have the right to play with people's lives like that!"