“‘How could you!” I gritted between my teeth, outraged anger thickening my words. “Is that the kind of people the Home is turning out now? Counting arms and legs and eyes more than the person?” Her tumbling hair whipped across my chin. “Permitting rejection and disgust for any living soul? Aren’t you taught even common kindness and compassion?” I wanted to hit her-to hit anything solid to protest this unthinkable thing that had been done to Obla, this unhealable wounding.
Salla snatched herself out of my grasp and hovered just out of reach, wet eyes glaring angrily down at me.
“It’s your fault, too!” she snapped, tears flowing. “I’d have died rather than do a thing like that to Obla or anyone else-if I had known! You didn’t tell me. You never visualized her that way-only strength and beauty and wholeness!”
“Why not!” I shot back angrily, lifting-level with her. “That’s the only way I ever see her any more. And trying to shift the blame-“
“It is your fault! Oh, Bram!” And she was crying in my arms. When she could speak again between sniffs and hiccoughs she said, “‘We don’t have people like that at Home. I mean, I never saw a-an incomplete person. I never saw scars and mutilation. Don’t you see, Bram? I was holding myself ready to receive her, completely-because she was part of you. And then to find myself embracing-” She choked. “Look-look, Bram, we have transgraph and-and regeneration-and no one ever stays unfinished.”
I let go of her slowly, lost in wonder. “Regeneration? Transgraph?”
“Yes, yes!” Salla cried. “She can have back her legs. She can have arms again. She can have her beautiful face again. She may even get back her eyes and her voice, though I don’t know for sure about that. She can be Obla again, instead of a dark prison for Obla.”
“No one told us.”
“No one asked.”
“‘Common concern.”
“I’ll ask then. Have you any dobic children? And cases of cazerinea? Any trimorph semia? It’s not that we don’t want to ask. How are we to know what to ask? We’ve never even heard of a-a basket case.” She took the word from me. “It just didn’t occur to us to ask.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, drying her eyes with the palms of my hands, lacking anything better. “I should have told you.” My words were but scant surface indications of my deep abject apology.
“Come,” she said, pulling away from me. “We must go to Obla-now-right now.”
It was Salla who finally coaxed Obla back down to her bed. It was Salla who held the broken weeping face against her slight young shoulder and poured the healing balms of her sorrow and understanding over Obla’s wounds. And it was Salla who told Obla of what the Home held for her. Told her and told her and told her, until Obla finally believed.
All three of us were limp and weary by then, and all three content just to sit for a minute, so the explosion of Davy into the room was twice the shock it ordinarily would have been.
“Hi, Bram! Hi, Salla! Hey, Obla! I got it fixed now. It won’t hiss on the s’s any more and you can trip the playback yourself. Here.” He plopped onto her pillow the little cube I recognized as his scriber. “Try it out. Go on. Try it out on Bram.”
Obla turned her face until her cheek felt the cube. Salla looked at me in wonderment and then at Obla. There was a brief pause and then a slight click and I heard, tiny but distinct, the first audible word I’d ever heard from Obla.
“Bram! Oh, Bram! Now I can go with you. I won’t be left behind. And when we get to the Home I’ll be whole again! Whole again!”
Through my shock I heard Davy say, “You didn’t even use one s, Obla! Say something essy, so’s I can check it.”
Obla thought I was going to the Home! She expected me to go with her! She didn’t know I’d decided to stay. That we were going to stay. I met Salla’s eyes. Our communication was quick and complete before the small voice said, “Salla, my sweet sister! I trust that’s sufficiently ‘essy’!” And I heard Obla’s laugh for the first time.
So, somewhere way back there, there is a tiny cave with a dime glowing in it, keeping in trust a preciousness between Salla and me-a candle in the window of memory. Somewhere way back there are the sights and sounds, the. smells and tastes, the homeness of Earth. For a while I have turned my back on the Promised Land. For our Jordan was crossed those long years ago. My trouble was that I thought that wherever I looked, just because I did the looking, was the goal ahead. But all the time, the Crossing, shimmering in the light of memory, had been something completed, not something yet to reach. My yearning for the Home must have been a little of the old hunger for the fleshpots that haunts any pioneering effort.
And Salla … Well, sometimes when I’m not looking she looks at me and then at Obla. And sometimes when she isn’t looking I look at her and then at Obla. Obla has no eyes, but sometimes when we aren’t looking she looks at me and then at Salla.
Things will happen to all three of us before Earth swells again in the portholes. but whatever happens Earth will swell in the portholes again-at least for me. And then I will truly be coming Home.
Zoltan 1.0