“But when they came to Montral, they were met by men with guns, and taken, and put into prisons; and there were all the others, from the big ships, all the people, waiting, in the prison camps.
“There were too many of them, the leaders of that land said. There were to have been two thousand, and there were ten thousand. There was no land or place for so many. They were dangerous, being so many. People from all over the Earth kept coming there to join them, and camping outside the city and outside the prison camps, and singing the songs of peace. Even from Brasil they were coming, they had begun their own Long March northward up the length of the great continents. The rulers of Canamerica were frightened. They said there was no way to keep order, or to feed so many. They said this was an invasion. They said the Peace was a lie, not the truth, because they didn’t understand it and didn’t want it. They said their own people were leaving them and joining the Peace, and this could not be allowed, because they must all fight the Long War with the Republic, that had been fought for twenty years and still was being fought. They said the People of the Peace were traitors, and spies from the Republic! And so they put us into the prison camps, instead of giving that land between the mountains they had promised us. There I was born, in the prison camp of Montral.
“At last the rulers said: Very well, we’ll keep our promise, we’ll give you land to live on, but there’s no place for you on Earth. We’ll give you the ship that was built in Brasil long ago, to send thieves and murderers away. Three ships they built, two they sent out to the world called Victoria, the third they never used because their law was changed. No one wants the ship because it was made to make only the one voyage, it cannot come back to Earth. Brasil has given us that ship. Two thousand of you are to go in it, that is all it can hold. And the rest of you must either find your way back to your own land across the ocean, back to Russia the Black, or live here in the prison camps making weapons for the War with the Republic. All your leaders must go on the ship, Mehta and Adelson, Kaminskaya and Wicewska and Shults; we will not have those men and women on the Earth, because they do not love the War. They must take the Peace to another world.
“So the two thousand were chosen by lot. And the choosing was bitter, the bitterest day of all the bitter days. For those that went, there was hope, but at what risk—going out unpiloted across the stars to an unknown world, never to return? And for those that must stay, there was no hope left. For there was no place left for the Peace on Earth.
“So the choice was made, and the tears were wept, and the ship was sent. And so, for those two thousand, and for their children and the children of their children, the Long March has ended. Here in the place we named Shantih, in the valleys of Victoria. But we do not forget the Long March and the great voyage and those we left behind, their arms stretched out to us. We do not forget the Earth.”
The children listened: fair faces and dark, black hair and brown; eyes intent, drowsy; enjoying the story, moved by it, bored by it … . They had all heard it before, young as some of them were. It was part of the world to them. Only to Luz was it new.
There were a hundred questions in her mind, too many; she let the children ask their questions. “Is Amity black because her grandmother came from Russia the Black?”—“Tell about the space ship! about how they went to sleep on the space ship!”—“Tell about the animals on Earth!”—Some of the questions were asked for her; they wanted her, the outsider, the big girl who didn’t know, to hear their favorite parts of the saga of their people. “Tell Luz about the flying-air-planes!” cried a little girl, very excited, and turning to Luz began to gabble the old man’s story for him: “His mother and father were on the boat in the middle of the sea and a flying ship went over them in the air, and went boom and fell in the sea and blew up and that was the Republic, and they saw it. And they tried to pick people up out of the water but there weren’t any and the water was poisonous and they had to go on.”—“Tell about the people that came from Afferca!” a boy demanded. But Hari was tired. “Enough now,” he said. “Let’s sing one of the songs of the Long March. Meria?”
A girl of twelve stood up, smiling, and faced the others. “O when we come,” she began in a sweet ringing voice, and the others joined in—
The clouds were moving away, heavy and ragged-fringed, over the river and the northern hills. To the south a streak of the outer Bay lay silver and remote. Drops from the last rainfall fell heavy now and then from the leaves of the big cottonwool trees on the summit of this hill that stood east of Southwind’s house; there was no other sound. A silent world, a gray world. Luz stood alone under the trees, looking out over the empty land. She had not been alone for a long time. She had not known, when she set off toward the hill, where she was going, what she was looking for. This place, this silence, this solitude. Her feet had borne her toward herself.
The ground was muddy, the weeds heavy with wet, but the poncho-coat Italia had given her was thick; she sat down on the springy leaf mold under the trees, and with arms around knees beneath the poncho sat still, gazing westward over the bend of the river. She sat so for a long time, seeing nothing but the moveless land, the slow-moving clouds and river.
Alone, alone. She was alone. She had not had time to know that she was alone, working with Southwind, nursing Vera, talking with Andre, joining little by little in the life of Shantih; helping to set up the new Town school, for the City school was closed henceforth to the people of Shantih; drawn in as guest to this house and that, this family and that; drawn in, made welcome, for they were gentle people, inexpert in resentment or distrust. Only at night, on the straw mattress in the dark of the loft, had it come to her, her loneliness, wearing a white and bitter face. She had been frightened, then. What shall I do? she had cried in her mind, and turning over to escape the bitter face of her solitude, had taken refuge in her weariness, in sleep.
It came to her now, walking softly along the gray hilltop. Its face now was Lev’s face. She had no wish to turn away.
It was time to look at what she had lost. To look at it and see it all. The sunset of spring over the roofs of the City, long ago, and his face lit by that glory—“There, there, you can see what it should be, what it is … .” The dusk of the room in Southwind’s house, and his face, his eyes. “To live and die for the sake of the spirit—” The wind and light on Rocktop Hill, and his voice. And the rest, all the rest, all the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.
If the spirit stayed in the world, Luz thought, that was where it had gone, by now: north to the valley he had found, to the mountains he had told her of, the last night before the march on the City, with such joy and yearning: “Higher than you can imagine, Luz, higher and whiter. You look up, and then up, and still there are peaks above the peaks.”
He would be there, now, not here. It was only her own solitude she looked at, though it wore his face.