He took no notice of our getting up and my leading him to the fragment of a wall that kept a stunted elderberry from falling into the canyon. We sat down and for a while tossed on the ocean of his desolation as I thought dimly, “Too. Lost, too. Both of us.” Then I helped him channel into speech, though I don’t know whether it was vocal or not.
“I was so little then,” he said. “I was only three, I guess. How long can you live on a three-year-old’s memories? Mom told me all they knew but I could remember more. There was a wreck-a head-on collision the other side of Chuckawalla. My people were killed. The car tried to fly just before they hit. I remember Father lifted it up, trying to clear the other car, and Mother grabbed a handful of sun and platted me out of danger, but the crash came and I could only hear Mother’s cry ‘Don’t forget! Go back to the Canyon,’ and Father’s ‘Remember! Remember the Home!’ and they were gone, even their bodies, in the fire that followed. Their bodies and every identification. Mom and Dad took me in and raised me like their own, but I’ve got to go back. I’ve got to go back to the Canyon. I belong there.”
“What Canyon?” I asked.
“What Canyon?” he asked dully. “The Canyon where the People live now-my People. The Canyon where they located after the starship crashed. The starship I’ve been questing for, praying I might find some little piece of it to point me the way to the Canyon. At least to the part of the state it’s in. The Canyon I went to sleep in before I woke at the crash. The Canyon I can’t find because I have no memory of the road there.
“But you know!” he went on. “You surely must know! You aren’t like the others. You’re one of us. You must be!”
I shrank down into myself.
“I’m nobody,” I said. “I’m not one of anybody. My Mom and dad can tell me my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, and they used to all the time, trying to figure out why they were burdened with such a child, until I got smart enough to get ‘normal’ “You think you’re lost! At least you know what you’re lost from. You could get un-lost. But I can’t. I haven’t ever been un-lost!”
“But you can talk underneath.” He blinked before my violence. “You showed me Lucine-“
“Yes,” I said recklessly. “And look at this!”
A rock up on the hillside suddenly spurted to life. It plowed down the slope, sending gravel flying, and smashed itself to powder against a boulder at the base.
“And I never tried this before, but look!”
I stepped up onto the crumbling wall and walked away from Low, straight on out over the canyon, feeling Earth fall away beneath my feet, feeling the soft cradling sweep of the wind, the upness and outness and unrestrainedness I cried out, lifting my arms, reaching ecstatically for the hem of my dream of freedom. One minute, one minute more and I could slide out of myself and never, never, never…
And then…
Low caught me just before I speared myself on the gaunt stubby pines below us in the canyon. He lifted me, struggling and protesting, back up through the fragile emptiness of air, back to the stunted elderberry tree.
“But I did! I did!” I sobbed against him. “I didn’t just fall. For a while I really did!”
“For a while you really did, Dita,” he murmured as to a child. “As good as I could do myself. So you do have some of the Persuasions. Where did you get them if you aren’t one of us?”
My sobs cut off without an after-echo, though my tears continued. I looked deep into Low’s eyes, fighting against the anger that burned at this persistent returning to the wary hurting place inside me. He looked steadily back until my tears stopped and I finally managed a ghost of a smile. “I don’t know what a Persuasion is, but I probably got it the same place you got that tilt to your eyebrows.”
He reddened and stepped back from me.
“We’d better start back. It’s not smart to get night-caught on these back roads.”
We started back along the trail
“Of course you’ll fill in the vacancies for me as we go back,” I said, barely catching myself as my feet slithered on a slick hump of granite. I felt his immediate protest. “You’ve got to,” I said, pausing to shake the gravel out of one shoe. “You can’t expect me to ignore today, especially since I’ve found someone as crazy as I am.”
“You won’t believe—” He dodged a huge buckbrush that crowded the narrow road.
“I’ve had to believe things about myself all these years that I couldn’t believe,” I said, “and it’s easier to believe things about other people.”
So we drove through the magic of an early twilight that deepened into a star-brilliant night, and I watched the flick of the stars through the overarching trees along the road and listened to Low’s story. He stripped it down to its bare bones, but underneath, the bones burned like fire in the telling.
“We came from some other world,” he said, wistful pride at belonging showing in his “we.” “The Home was destroyed. We looked for a refuge and found this earth. Our ships crashed or burned before they could land. But some of us escaped in life slips. My grandparents were with the original Group that gathered at the Canyon. But we were all there, too, because our memories are joined continuously back into the Bright Beginning. That’s why I know about my People. Only I can’t remember where the Canyon is, because I was asleep the one time we left it, and Mother and Father couldn’t tell me in that split second before the crash.
“I’ve got to find the Canyon again. I can’t go on living forever limping.” He didn’t notice my start at his echoing of that thought of mine when I was with Lucine. “‘I can’t achieve any stature at all until I am with my People.
“I don’t even know the name of the Canyon, but I do remember that our ship crashed in the hills and I’m always hoping that someday I’ll find some evidence of it in one of these old ghost towns. It was before the turn of the century that we came, and somewhere, somewhere, there must be some evidence of the ship still in existence.”
His was a well-grooved story, too, worn into commonplace by repetition as mine had been-lonely aching repetition to himself. I wondered for a moment, in the face of his unhappiness, why I should feel a stirring of pleased comfort, but then I realized that it was because between us there was no need for murmurs of sympathy or trite little social sayings or even explanations. The surface words were the least of our communication.
“You aren’t surprised?” He sounded almost disappointed.
“That you are an out-worlder?” I asked. I smiled. “Well, I’ve never met one before and I find it interesting. I only wish I could have dreamed up a fantasy like that to explain me to me. It’s quite a switch on the old “I must be adopted because I’m so different.’ But-“
I stiffened as Low’s surge of rage caught me offguard.
“Fantasy! I am adopted. I remember! I thought you’d know. I thought since you surely must be one of us that you’d be-“
“I’m not one of you!” I flared. “Whatever ‘you’ are. I’m of Earth-so much so that it’s a wonder the dust doesn’t puff out of my mouth when I speak-but at least I don’t try to kid myself that I’m normal by any standard, Earth-type or otherwise.”
For a hostile minute we were braced stonily against each other. My teeth ached as the muscles on my jaws knotted. Then Low sighed and reaching out a finger he traced the line of my face from brow to chin to brow again.
“Think your way,” he said. “You’ve probably been through enough bad times to make anyone want to forget. Maybe someday you’ll remember that you are one of us and then-“
“Maybe, maybe, maybe!” I said through my weary shaken breath. “But I can’t any more. It’s too much for one day.” I slammed all the doors I could reach and shoved my everyday self up to the front. As we started off I reopened one door far enough to ask, “What’s this between you and Lucine? Are you a friend of the family or something that you’re working with her?”