I’m a poor hand at telling time. I couldn’t tell you even to within a year how long ago it was that Shua lifted the Ship from the flat at Cougar Canyon and started the trip from Earth to The Home. I remembered how excited I was. Even my ponytail had trembled as the great adventure began. Thann swears he was standing so close to me at Takeoff that the ponytail tickled his nose. But I don’t remember him. I don’t even remember seeing him at all during the long trip when the excitement of being evacuated from Earth dulled to the routine of travel and later became resurrected as anxiety about what The Home would be like.
I don’t remember him at all until that desolate day on The Home when I stood at the end of the so-precise little lane that wound so consciously lovely from the efficient highway. I was counting, through the blur of my tears, the precisely twenty-six trees interspersed at suitable intervals by seven clumps of underbrush. He just happened to be passing at the moment end I looked up at him and choked, “Not even a weed! Not one!”
Astonished, he folded his legs and hovered a little above eye level.
“What good’s a weed?”
“At least it shows individuality!” I shut my eyes, not caring that by so doing the poised tears consolidated and fell “I’m so sick of perfection!”
“Perfection?” He lifted a little higher above me, his eyes on some far sight. “I certainly wouldn’t call The Home perfect yet. From here I can see the North Reach. We’ve only begun to nibble at that. The preliminary soil crew is just starting analysis.” He dropped down beside me. “We can’t waste time and space on weeds. It’ll take long enough to make the whole of The Home habitable without using energy on nonessentials.”
“They’ll find out!” I stubbornly proclaimed. “Someday they’ll find out that weeds are essentials. Man wasn’t made for such-such neatness. He has to have unimportant clutter to relax in!”
“Why haven’t you presented these fundamental doctrines to the Old Ones?” He laughed at me.
“Have I not!” I retorted. “Well, maybe not to the Old Ones, but I’ve already expressed myself, and further more, Mr.-Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Debbie-“
“I’m Thannel,” he grinned.
“-Thannel, I’ll have you know other wiser heads than mine have come to the same conclusion. Maybe not in my words, but they mean the same thing. This artificiality-this-this-The People aren’t meant to live divorced from the-the-” I spread my hands. “Soil, I guess you could say. They lose something when everything gets-gets paved.”
“Oh, I think we’ll manage,” he smiled. “Memory can sustain.”
“Memory? Oh, Thann, remember the tangle of blackberry vines in back of Kroginold’s house? How we used to burrow under the scratchy, cool, green twilight in under these vines and hunt for berries-cool ones from the shadows, and warm ones from the sun, and always at least one thorn in the thumb as payment for trespassing. Mmmm-” Eyes closed, I lost myself in the memory.
Then my eyes flipped open. “Or are you from the other Home? Maybe you’ve never even seen Earth.”
“Yes, I have,” he said, suddenly sober. “I’m from Bendo. I haven’t many happy memories of Earth. Until your Group found us, we had a pretty thin time of it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Bendo was our God Bless for a long time when I was little.”
“Thank you.” He straightened briskly and grinned. “How about a race to the twenty-third despised tree, just to work off a little steam!”
And the two of us lifted and streaked away, a yard above the careful gravel of the lane, but I got the giggles so badly that I blundered into the top of the twenty-first tree and had to be extricated gingerly from its limbs. Together we guiltily buried at its foot the precious tiny branch I had broken off in my blundering, and then, with muffled laughter and guilty back-glances, we went our separate ways.
That night I lay and waited for the pale blue moon of The Home to vault into the sky, and thought about Earth and the Other Home.
The other Home was first, of course-the beautiful prototype of this Home. But it had weeds! And all the tangled splendor of wooded hillsides and all soaring upreach naked peaks and the sweet uncaring, uncountable profusion of life, the same as Earth. But The Home died-blasted out of the heavens by a cosmic Something that shattered it and scattered the People like birds from a falling tree. Part of them found this Home-or the bare bones of it-and started to remake it into The Home. Others found refuge on Earth. We had it rough for a long time because we were separated from each other. Besides, we were Different, with a capital D, and some of us didn’t survive the adjustment period. Slowly though, we were Gathered In until there were two main Groups-Cougar Canyon and Bendo. Bendo lived in a hell of concealment and fear long after Cougar Canyon had managed to adjust to an Outsider’s world.
Then that day-even now my breath caught at the wonder of that day when the huge ship from the New Home drifted down out of the skies and came to rest on the flat beyond the schoolhouse!
And everyone had to choose. Stay or go. My family chose to go. More stayed. But the Oldest, Cougar Canyon’s leader, blind, crippled, dying from what the Crossing had done to him, he went. But you should see him now! You should see him see! And Obla came too. Sometimes I went to her house just to touch her hands. She had none, you know, on Earth. Nor legs nor eyes, and hardly a face. An explosion had stripped her of all of them. But now, because of transgraph and regeneration, she is becoming whole again-except perhaps her heart-but that’s another story.
Once the wonder of the trip and the excitement of living without concealment, without having to watch every movement so’s not to shock Outsiders, had died a little, I got homesicker and homesicker. At first I fought it as a silly thing, a product of letdown, or idleness. But a dozen new interests, frenzied activities that consumed every waking moment, did nothing to assuage the aching need in me. I always thought homesickness was a childish, transitory thing. Well, most of it, but occasionally there is a person who actually sickens of it and does not recover, short of Return. And I guess I was one of those. It was as though I were breathing with one lung or trying to see with one eye. Sometimes the growing pain became an anguish so physical that I’d crouch in misery, hugging my hurt to me, trying to contain it between my knees and my chest-trying to ease it. Sometimes I could manage a tear or two that relieved a little-such as that day in the lane with Thann.
“Thann!” I turned from the port. “Isn’t it about time-“
“One up on you, Debbie-my-dear,” Thann called from the Motive room. “I’m just settling into the old groove. Got to get us slowed down before we scorch our little bottoms and maybe even singe Child Within.”
“Don’t joke about it!” I said. “Remember, the first time the atmosphere gave us too warm a welcome to Earth. Ask the Oldest.”
“The Power be with us,” came Thann’s quick answering thought.
“And the Name and the Presence,” I echoed, bowing my head as my fingers moved to the Sign and then clasped above Child Within. I moved over to the couch and lay down, feeling the almost imperceptible slowing of our little craft.
Thann and I started two-ing not long after we met and, at flahmen Gathering time, we Bespoke one another and, just before Festival time, we were married.
Perhaps all this time I was hoping that starting a home of my own would erase my longing for Earth and perhaps Thann hoped the same thing. The Home offered him almost all he wanted and he had a job he loved. He felt the pioneering thrill of making a new world and was contented. But my need didn’t evaporate. Instead, it intensified. I talked it over with the Sorter for our Group (a Sorter cares for our emotional and mental problems) because I was beginning to hate-oh, not hate! That’s such a poisonous thing to have festering in your mind. But my perspective was getting so twisted that I was making both myself and Thann unhappy. She Sorted me deftly and thoroughly-and I went home to Thann and he started training to develop his latent Motive ability. We both knew we could well lose our lives trying to return to Earth, but we had to try. Anyway, I had to try, especially after I found out about Child Within. I told Thann and his face lighted up as I knew it would, but-