As I neared the Canyon I heard the cry and saw one after another of the Group shoot upward toward Baldy. I forgot that momentary pang and shot upward with the rest of them. And my hands were among the first to feel the tingly hot-and-cold sleekness of the ship that was cooling yet from the heat of entry into the atmosphere. It was only a matter of minutes before the hands of the whole Group from the Canyon bore the ship downward from the clouds to the haven of the pine flats beyond Cougar-bore it rejoicing, singing an almost forgotten welcome song of the People.
Still tingling to the song I rushed to Obla’s house, bringing, as always, any new event to her, since she could come to none.
“Obla! Obla!” I cried as I slammed in through her door.
“They’ve come! They’ve come! They’re here! Someone from the New Home-Then I remembered, and I went in to her mind. The excitement so filled my own mind that I didn’t even have to verbalize for her before she caught the sight. Through my wordlessly sputtering delight I caught her faint chuckle.
“Bram, the ship couldn’t have rainbows around it and be diamond-studded from end to end!”
I laughed, too, a little abashed. “No, I guess not,” I thought back at her. “But it should have a halo on it!”
Then for the next while I sat in the quiet room and relived every second of the event for Obla: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel of everything, including a detailed description of the-haloless-ship. And Obla, deaf, blind, voiceless, armless, legless, Obla who would horrify most any outsider, lived the whole event with me, questioned me minutely, and finally lifted her unheard voice with the rest of us in the song of welcome.
“Obla.” I moved closer to her and looked down at the quiet scarred face, framed in the abundance of dark vigorous hair.
“‘Obla, it means the Home, the real Home. And for you-“
“And for me-” Her lips tightened and her eyelids flattened. Then the curtain of her hair swirled across her face as she hid herself from my eyes. “Perhaps a kinder world to hide this hideous-“
“Not hideous!” I cried indignantly.
Her soft chuckle tickled my mind. “Well, not, anyway,” she said. “You’ll have to admit that the explosion didn’t leave much of me-” Her hair flowed back from her face and spread across the pillow.
“The part of you that counts!” I exclaimed.
“On Earth you need a physical container. One that functions. And just once I wish that-” Her mind blanked before I could catch her wish. The glass of water lifted from the bedside stand and hovered at her month. She drank briefly. The glass slid back to its place.
“‘So you’re all afire to blast off?” her thought teased. “Back to civilization! Farewell to the rugged frontier!”
“‘Yes, I am,” I said defiantly. “Yon know how I feel. It’s criminal to waste lives like ours. If we can’t live to capacity here let’s go Home!”
“To which Home?” she questioned. “The one we knew is gone. What is the new one like?’”
“Well-” I hesitated, “I don’t know. We haven’t communicated yet. But it must be almost like the old Home. At least it’s probably inhabited by the People, our People.”
“Are you so sure we’re still the same People?” Obla persisted.
“Or that they are? Time and distance can change-“
“Of course we’re the same,” I cried. “That’s like asking if a dog is a dog in the Canyon just because he was born in Socorro.”
“I had a dog once,” Obla said. “A long time ago. He thought he was people because he’d never been around other dogs. It took him six months to learn to bark. It came as quite a blow to him when he found out he was a dog.”
“‘If you mean we’ve deteriorated since we came-“
“You chose the dog, not I. Let’s not quarrel. Besides I didn’t say that we were the dog.”
“Yeah, but-“
“Yeah, but-” she echoed, amused, and I laughed.
“Darn you, Obla, that’s the way most of my arguments with you end-yeah-but, yeah-but!”
“Why don’t they come out?” I rapped impatiently against the vast seamless bulk, shadowy above me in the night. “What’s the delay?”
“You’re being a child, Bram,” Jemmy said. “They have their reasons for waiting. Remember this is a strange world to them. They must be sure-“
“Sure!” I gestured impatiently. “We’ve told them the air’s okay and there’s no viruses waiting to snap them off. Besides they have their personal shields. They don’t even have to touch this earth if they don’t want to. Why don’t they come out?”
“Bram.” I recognized the tone of Jemmy’s voice.
“Oh, I know, I know,” I said. “Impatience, impatience. Everything in its own good time. But now, Jemmy, now that they’re here, you and Valancy will have to give in. They’ll make you see that the thing for us People to do is to get out completely or else get in there with the Outsiders and clean up this mess of a world. With this new help we could do it easily. We could take over key positions-“
“No matter how many have come-and we don’t know yet how many there are,” Jemmy said, “this ‘taking over’ isn’t the way of the People. Things must grow. You only graft in extreme cases. And destroy practically never. But let’s not get involved in all that again now. Valancy-“
Valancy slanted down, the stars behind her, from above the ship. “Jemmy.” Their hands brushed as her feet reached the ground. There it was again. That wordless flame of joy, that completeness as they met, after a long ten minutes’ separation. That made me impatient, too. I never felt that kind of oneness with anyone.
I heard Valancy’s little laugh. “Oh, Bram,” she said, “do you have to have your whole dinner in one gulp? Can’t you be content to wait for anything?”
“It might be a good idea for you to do a little concentrated thinking,” Jemmy said. “They won’t be coming out until morning. You stay here on guard tonight-“
“On guard against what?” I asked.
“Against impatience,” Jemmy said, his voice taking on the Old One tone that expected obedience without having to demand it. Amusement had crept back into his voice before his next sentence. “For the good of your soul, Bram, and the contemplation of your sins, keep watch this whole night. I have a couple of blankets in the pickup.” He gestured, and the blankets drifted through the scrub oak. “There, that’ll hold you. till morning.”
I watched the two of them meet with the pickup truck above the thin trickle of the creek. Valancy called back, “Thinking might help, Bram. You should try it.”
A startled night bird flapped dismally ahead of them for a while, and then the darkness took them all.
I spread the blankets on the sand by the ship, leaning against the smooth coolness of its outer skin, marveling anew at its seamlessness, the unbroken flow along its full length. Somewhere there had to be an exit, but right now the evening light ran uninterrupted from glowing end to glowing end.
Who was in there? How many were in there? A ship of this size could carry hundreds. Their communicator and ours had spoken briefly together, ours stumbling a little with words we remembered of the Home tongue that seemed to have changed or fallen out of use, but no mention of numbers was made before the final thought: “We are tired. It’s a long journey. Thanks be to the Power, the Presence and the Name that we have found you. We will rest until morning.”
The drone of a high-flying turbo-jet above the Canyon caught my ear. I glanced quickly up; Our unlight still humped itself up over the betraying shine of the ship. I relaxed on the blankets, wondering-wondering ….