“This ought to make a bond between you and The Home,” he said. “Now you’ll find unsuspected virtues in this land you’ve been spurning.”
I felt my heart grow cold. “Oh, no, Thann!” I said. “Now more than ever we must go. Our child can’t be born here. He must be of Earth. And I want to be able to enjoy this Child Within-“
“This is quite a Child Without,” said Thann, tempering the annoyance in his voice by touching my cheek softly, “crying for a lollipop, Earth flavored. Ah, well!” He gathered me into his arms. “Hippity-hop to the candy shop!”
A high thin whistle signaled the first brush of Earth’s atmosphere against our craft-as though Earth were reaching up to scrape tenuous incandescent fingers against our underside. I cleared my mind and concentrated on the effort ahead. I’m no Motiver, but Thann might need my strength before we landed.
Before we landed! Setting down on the flat again, under Old Baldy! And seeing them all again! Valancy and Karen and the Francher Kid. Oh, the song the Kid would be singing would be nothing to the song my heart would be singing! Home! Child Within! Home again! I pressed my hands against the swell of Child Within. Pay attention I admonished. Be ready for your first consciousness of Earth. “I won’t look,” I told myself. “Until we touch down on the flat. I’ll keep my eyes shut!” And I did.
So when the first splashing crash came, I couldn’t believe it. My eyes opened to the sudden inrush of water and I was gasping and groping in complete bewilderment trying to find air. “Thann! Thann!” I was paddling awkwardly, trying to keep my head above water. What had happened? How could we have so missed the Canyon-even as inexperienced a Motiver as Thann was? Water? Water to drown in, anywhere near the Canyon?
There was a gulp and the last bubble of air belched out of our turning craft. I was belched out through a jagged hole along with the air.
Thann! Thann! I abandoned vocal calling and spread my cry clear across the band of subspeech. No reply-no reply! I bobbed on the surface of the water, gasping. Oh Child, stay Within. Be Careful. Be Careful! It isn’t time yet. It isn’t time!
I shook my dripping hair out of my eyes and felt a nudge against my knees. Down I went into darkness, groping, groping-and found him! Inert, unresponsive, a dead weight in my arms. The breathless agony of struggle ended in the slippery mud of a rocky shore. I dragged him up far enough that his head was out of the water, listened breathlessly for a heartbeat, then, mouth to mouth, I breathed life back into him and lay gasping beside him in the mud, one hand feeling the struggle as his lungs labored to get back into rhythm. The other hand was soothing Child Within. Not now, not now! Wait-wait!
When my own breathing steadied, I tore strips off my tattered travel suit and bound up his head, staunching the blood that persistently threaded down from the gash above his left ear. Endlessly, endlessly, I lay there listening to his heart-to my heart-too weak to move him, too weak to move myself. Then the rhythm of his breathing changed and I felt his uncertain thoughts, questioning, asking. My thoughts answered his until he knew all I knew about what had happened. He laughed a ghost of a laugh.
“Is this untidy enough for you?” And I broke down and cried.
We lay there in mud and misery, gathering our strength. I started once to a slithering splash across the water from us and felt a lapping of water over my feet. I pulled myself up on one elbow and peered across at the barren hillside. A huge chunk of it had broken off and slithered down into the water. The scar was raw and ragged in the late evening sunshine.
“Where did it come from?” I asked, wonderingly. “All this water! And there is Baldy, with his feet all awash. What happened?”
“The rain is raining,” said Thann, his voice choked with laughter, his head rolling on the sharp shale of the bank.
“The rain is raining-and don’t go near the water!” His nonsense ended with a small moan that tore my heart.
“Thann, Thann! Let’s get out of this mess. Come on. Can you lift? Help me-“
He lifted his head and let it fall back with a thunk against the rocks. His utter stillness panicked me. I sobbed as I reached into my memory for the inanimate lift. It seemed a lifetime before I finally got him up out of the mud and hovered him hand high above the bank. Cautiously I pushed him along, carefully guiding him between the bushes and trees until I found a flat place that crunched with fallen oak leaves. I “platted” him softly to the ground and for a long time I lay there by him, my hand on his sleeve, not even able to think coherently about what had happened.
The sun was gone when I shivered and roused myself. I was cold and Thann was shaken at intervals by an icy shuddering. I scrambled around in the fading fight and gathered wood together and laid a fire. I knelt by the neat stack and gathered myself together for the necessary concentration. Finally, after sweat had gathered on my forehead and trickled into my eyes, I managed to produce a tiny spark that sputtered and hesitated and then took a shining bite out of a dry leaf. I rubbed my hands above the tiny flame and waited for it to grow. Then I lifted Thann’s head to my lap and started the warmth circulating about us.
When our shivering stopped, I suddenly caught my breath and grimaced wryly. How quickly we forget! I was getting as bad as an Outsider! And I clicked my personal shield on, extending it to include Thann. In the ensuing warmth, I looked down at Thann, touching his mud-stained cheek softly, letting my love flow to him like a river of strength. I heard his breathing change and he stirred under my hands.
“Are we Home?” he asked.
“We’re on Earth,” I said.
“We left Earth years ago,” he chided. “Why do I hurt so much?”
“We came back.” I kept my voice steady with an effort.
“Because of me-and Child Within.”
“Child Within-” His voice strengthened. “Hippity-hop to the candy shop,” he remembered. “What happened?”
“The Canyon isn’t here any more,” I said, raising his shoulders carefully into my arms. “We crashed into water. Everything’s gone. We lost everything.” My heart squeezed for the tiny gowns Child Within would never wear.
“Where are our People?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“When you find them, you’ll be all right,” he said drowsily.
“We’ll be all right,” I said sharply, my arms tightening around him “In the morning, we’ll find them and Bethie will find out what’s wrong with you and we’ll mend you.”
He sat up slowly, haggard and dirty in the upflare of firelight, his hand going to his bandaged head. “I’m broken,” he said. “A lot of places. Bones have gone where bones should never go. I will be Called.”
“Don’t say it!” I gathered him desperately into my arms.
“Don’t say it, Thann! We’ll find the People!” He crumpled down against me, his cheek pressed to the curve of Child Within.
I screamed then, partly because my heart was being torn shred by shred into an aching mass-partly because my neglected little fire was happily crackling away from me, munching the dry leaves, sampling the brush, roaring softly into the lower branches of the scrub oak. I had set the hillside afire! And the old terror was upon me, the remembered terror of a manzanita slope blazing on Baldy those many forgotten years ago.
I cradled Thann to me. So far the fire was moving away from us, but soon, soon-