Any of those might have been a picture of Petra’s future…. I shifted over beside her, and put an arm round her. During all the Sealand woman’s disquisition Michael had been gazing out of the entrance, running his eyes almost covetously over the machine that waited in the clearing. He went on studying it for a minute or two after she had stopped, then he sighed, and turned away. For a few moments he contemplated the rock floor between his feet. Presently he looked up.
‘Petra,’ he asked. ‘Do you think you could reach Rachel for me?’
Petra put out the inquiry, in her forceful way. ‘Yes. She’s there. She wants to know what’s happening,’ she told him.
‘Say first that whatever she may hear, we’re all alive and quite all right.’
‘Yes,’ said Petra presently. ‘She understands that.’ ‘Now I want you to tell her this,’ Michael went on carefully. ‘She is to go on being brave — and very careful — and in a little time, three or four days, perhaps, I shall come and fetch her away. Will you tell her that?’
Petra made the relay energetically, but quite faithfully, and then sat waiting for the response. A small frown gradually appeared.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, with a touch of disgust. ‘She’s gone all muddled up and crying again. She does seem to cry an awful lot, that girl, doesn’t she? I don’t see why. Her behind-thinks aren’t miserable at all this time: it’s sort of happy-crying. Isn’t that silly?’
All of us looked at Michael, without open comment.
‘Well,’ he said, defensively, ‘you two are proscribed as outlaws, so neither of you can go.’
‘But, Michael—’ Rosalind began.
‘She’s quite alone,’ said Michael. ‘Would you leave David alone there, or would David leave you?’
There was no answer to that.
‘You said “fetch her away,”’ observed Rosalind.
‘That’s what I meant. We could stay in Waknuk for a while, waiting for the day when we, or perhaps our children, would be found out…. That’s not good enough….
‘Or we could come to the Fringes.’ He looked round the cave and out across the clearing with distaste. ‘That’s not good enough either.
‘Rachel deserves just as well as any of the rest of us. All right, then; since the machine can’t take her, someone’s got to bring her.’
The Sealand woman was leaning forward, watching him. There was sympathy and admiration in her eyes, but she shook her head gently.
‘It’s a very long way — and there’s that awful, impassable country in between,’ she reminded him.
‘I know that,’ he acknowledged. ‘But the world is round, so there must be another way to get there.’
‘It would be hard — and certainly dangerous,’ she warned.
‘No more dangerous than to stay in Waknuk. Besides, how could we stay now, knowing that there is a place for people like us, that there is somewhere to go.
‘Knowing makes all the difference. Knowing that we’re not just pointless freaks — a few bewildered deviations hoping to save their own skins. It’s the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for.’
The Sealand woman thought for a moment or two, then she raised her eyes to meet his again.
‘When you do reach us, Michael,’ she told him, ‘you can be very sure of your place with us.’
The door shut with a thud. The machine started to vibrate and blow a great dusty wind across the clearing. Through the windows we could see Michael bracing himself against it, his clothes flapping. Even the deviational trees about the clearing were stirring in their webby shrouds.
The floor tilted beneath us. There was a slight lurch, then the ground began to drop away as we climbed faster and faster into the evening sky. Soon we steadied, pointed towards the south-west.
Petra was excited, and a bit over strength.
‘It’s awfully wonderful,’ she announced. ‘I can see for simply miles and miles and miles. Oh, Michael, you do look funny and tiny down there!’
The lone, miniature figure in the clearing waved its arm.
‘Just at present,’ Michael’s thought came up to us, ‘I seem to be feeling a bit funny and tiny down here, Petra, dear. But it’ll pass. We’ll be coming after you.’
It was just as I had seen it in my dreams. A brighter sun than Waknuk ever knew poured down upon the wide blue bay where the lines of white-topped breakers crawled slowly to the beach. Small boats, some with coloured sails, and some with none, were making for the harbour already dotted with craft. Clustered along the shore, and thinning as it stretched back towards the hills, lay the city with its white houses embedded among green parks and gardens. I could even make out the tiny vehicles sliding along the wide, tree-bordered avenues. A little inland, beside a square of green, a bright light was blinking from a tower and a fish-shaped machine was floating to the ground.
It was so familiar that I almost misgave. For a swift moment I imagined that I should wake to find myself back in my bed in Waknuk. I took hold of Rosalind’s hand to reassure myself.
‘It is real, isn’t it? You can see it, too?’ I asked her.
‘It’s beautiful, David. I never thought there could be anything so lovely…. And there’s something else, too, that you never told me about.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Listen!… Can’t you feel it? Open your mind more…. Petra, darling, if you could stop bubbling over for a few minutes…’
I did as she told me. I was aware of the engineer in our machine communicating with someone below, but behind that, as a background to it, there was something new and unknown to me. In terms of sound it could be not unlike the buzzing of a hive of bees; in terms of light, a suffused glow.
‘What is it?’ I said, puzzled.
‘Can’t you guess, David? It’s people. Lots and lots of our kind of people.’
I realized she must be right, and I listened to it for a bit — until Petra’s excitement got the better of her, and I had to protect myself.
We were over the land now, and looked down at the city coming up to meet us.
‘I’m beginning to believe it’s real and true at last,’ I told Rosalind. ‘You were never with me those other times.’
She turned her head. The under-Rosalind was in her face, smiling, shiny-eyed. The armour was gone. She let me look beneath it. It was like a flower opening….
‘This time, David—’ she began.
Then she was blotted out. We staggered, and put our hands to our heads. Even the floor under our feet jerked a little.
Anguished protests came from all directions.
‘Oh, sorry,’ Petra apologized to the ship’s crew, and to the city in general, ‘but it is awfully exciting.’
‘This time, darling, we’ll forgive you,’ Rosalind told her. ‘It is.’