The People

Maybe they'll all be Called with me. For me there's flame and brightness and pain-then the Presence. That's all I know.
"But, Gramma"-his voice had returned to that of a normal ten-year-old-"Lytha's feeling awful bad. Help her."
The children were laughing and frolicking in the thin blanket of snow that whitened the hills and meadows, their clear, untroubled laughter echoing through the windows to me and 'Chell, who, with close-pressed lips, were opening the winter chests that had been closed so short a time ago. 'Chell fingered the bead stitching on the toes of one little ankle-high boot.
"What will we need in the new Home, Eva-lee?" she asked despairingly.
"We have no way of knowing," I said. "We have no idea of what kind of Home we'll find." If any, if any, if any, our unspoken thoughts throbbed together.
"I've been thinking about that," said 'Chell. "What will it be like? Will we be able to live as we do now or will we have to go back to machines and the kind of times that went with our machines? Will we still be one People or be separated mind and soul?" Her hands clenched on a bright sweater and a tear slid down her cheek. "Oh, Eva-lee, maybe we won't even be able to feel the Presence there!"
"You know better than that!" I chided. "The Presence is with us always, even if we have to go to the ends of the Universe. Since we can't know now what the new Home will be like, let's not waste our tears on it." I shook out a gaily patterned quilted skirt. "Who knows," I laughed, "maybe it will be a water world and we'll become fish. Or a fire world and we the flames!"
"We can't adjust quite that much!" protested 'Chell, smiling moistly as she dried her face on the sweater. "But it is a comfort to know we can change some to match our environment."
I reached for another skirt and paused, hand outstretched.
" 'Chell," I said, taken by a sudden idea, "what if the new Home is already inhabited? What if life is already there?”
"Why then, so much the better," said 'Chell. "Friends, help, places to live-"
"They might not accept us," I said.
"But refugees-homeless!" protested 'Chell. "If any in need came to the Home-"
"Even if they were different?"
"In the Presence, all are the same," said 'Chell. "But remember," my knuckles whitened on the skirt. "Only remember far enough back and you will find the Days of Difference before the Peace."
And 'Chell remembered. She turned her stricken face to me. "You mean there might be no welcome for us if we do find a new Home?"
"If we could treat our own that way, how might others treat strangers?" I asked, shaking out the scarlet skirt. "But, please the Power, it will not be so. We can only pray."
It turned out that we had little need to worry about what kind of clothing or anything else to take with us. We would have to go practically possessionless-there was room for only the irreducible minimum of personal effects. There was considerable of an uproar and many loud lamentations when Eve found out that she could not take all of her play-People with her, and, when confronted by the necessity of making a choice-one, single one of her play-People, she threw them all in a tumbled heap in the corner of her room, shrieking that she would take none at all. A sharp smack of David's hand on her bare thighs for her tantrum, and a couple of enveloping hugs for her comfort, and she sniffed up her tears and straightened out her play-People into a staggering, tumbling row across the floor. It took her three days to make her final selection. She chose the one she had named the Listener.
"She's not a him and he's not a her," she had explained.
“This play-People is to listen."
"To what?" teased Davie.
"To anything I have to tell and can't tell anyone," said Eve with great dignity. "You don't even have to verb'lize to Listener. All you have to do is to touch and Listener knows what you feel and it tells you why it doesn't feel
good and the bad goes away."
"Well, ask the Listener how to make the bad grammar go away," laughed Davie. "You've got your sentences all mixed lip."
"Listener knows what I mean and so do you!" retorted Eve.
So when Eve made her choice and stood hugging Listener and looking with big solemn eyes at the rest of her play-People, Davie suggested casually, "Why don't you go bury the rest of them? They're the same as Called now and we don't leave cast-asides around."
And from then until the last day, Eve was happy burying and digging up her play-People, always finding better, more advantageous, or prettier places to make her miniature casting-place.
Lytha sought me out one evening as I leaned over the stone wall around the feather-pen, listening to the go-to-bed contented cluckings and cooings. She leaned with me on the rough gray stones and, snapping an iridescent feather to her hand, smoothed her fingers back and forth along it wordlessly. We both listened idly to Eve and Davie. We could hear them talking together somewhere in the depths of the koomatka bushes beyond the feather-pen.
"What's going to happen to the Home after we're gone?" asked Eve idly.
"Oh, it's going to shake and crack wide open and fire and lava will come out and everything will fall apart and burn up," said Davie, no more emotionally than Eve.
"Ooo!" said Eve, caught in the imagination. "Then what will happen to my play-People? Won't they be all right under here? No one can see them."
"Oh, they'll be set on fire and go up in a blaze of glory," said Davie.
"A blaze of glory!" Eve drew a long happy sigh. "In a blaze of glory! Inna blaza glory! Oh, Davie! I'd like to see it. Can I, Davie? Can I?"
"Silly toola!" said Davie. "If you were here to see it, you'd go up in a blaze of glory, too!" And he lifted up from the koomatka bushes, the time for his chores with the animals hot on his heels.
"Inna blaza glory! Inna blaza glory!" sang Eve happily.
"All the play-People inna blaza glory! Her voice faded to a tuneless hum as she left, too.
"Gramma," said Lytha, "is it really true?"
"Is what really true?" I asked.
"That the Home won't he any more and that we will be gone."
"Why yes, Lytha, why do you doubt it?"
"Because-because-" She gestured with the feather at the wall. "Look, it's all so solid-the stones set each to the other so solidly-so-so always-looking. How can it all come apart?"
"You know from your first consciousness that nothing This-side is forever," I said. "Nothing at all except Love. And even that gets so tangled up in the things of This-side that when your love is Called-" The memory of Thann was a heavy burning inside me-"Oh, Lytha! To look into the face of your love and know that Something has come apart and that never again This-side will you find him whole!"
And then I knew I had said the wrong thing. I saw Lytha's too young eyes looking in dilated horror at the sight of her love-her not-quite-yet love, being pulled apart by this same whatever that was pulling the Home apart. I turned the subject.
"I want to go to the Lake for a good-by," I said. "Would you like to go with me?"
"No, thank you, Granma." Hers was a docile, little girl voice-oh surely much too young to be troubled about loves as yet! "We teeners are going to watch the new metal-melting across the hills. It's fascinating. I'd like to be able to do things like that."
"You can-you could have-" I said, "-if we had trained our youth as we should have."
"Maybe I'll learn," said Lytha, her eyes intent on the feather. She sighed deeply and dissolved the feather into a faint puff of blue smoke. "Maybe I'll learn." And I knew her mind was not on metal-melting.
She turned away and then back again. "Gramma, The Love-" She stopped. I could feel her groping for words.
"The Love is forever, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said.
"Love This-side is part of The Love, isn't it?"