The People

And everyone had to choose. Stay or go. My family chose to go. More stayed. But the Oldest, Cougar Canyon's leader, blind, crippled, dying from what the Crossing had done to him, he went. But you should see him now! You should see him see! And Obla came too. Sometimes I went to her house just to touch her hands. She had none, you know, on Earth. Nor legs nor eyes, and hardly a face. An explosion had stripped her of all of them. But now, because of transgraph and regeneration, she is becoming whole again-except perhaps her heart-but that's another story.
Once the wonder of the trip and the excitement of living without concealment, without having to watch every movement so's not to shock Outsiders, had died a little, I got homesicker and homesicker. At first I fought it as a silly thing, a product of letdown, or idleness. But a dozen new interests, frenzied activities that consumed every waking moment, did nothing to assuage the aching need in me. I always thought homesickness was a childish, transitory thing. Well, most of it, but occasionally there is a person who actually sickens of it and does not recover, short of Return. And I guess I was one of those. It was as though I were breathing with one lung or trying to see with one eye. Sometimes the growing pain became an anguish so physical that I'd crouch in misery, hugging my hurt to me, trying to contain it between my knees and my chest-trying to ease it. Sometimes I could manage a tear or two that relieved a little-such as that day in the lane with Thann.
"Thann!" I turned from the port. "Isn't it about time-"
"One up on you, Debbie-my-dear," Thann called from the Motive room. "I'm just settling into the old groove. Got to get us slowed down before we scorch our little bottoms and maybe even singe Child Within."
"Don't joke about it!" I said. "Remember, the first time the atmosphere gave us too warm a welcome to Earth. Ask the Oldest."
"The Power be with us," came Thann's quick answering thought.
"And the Name and the Presence," I echoed, bowing my head as my fingers moved to the Sign and then clasped above Child Within. I moved over to the couch and lay down, feeling the almost imperceptible slowing of our little craft.
Thann and I started two-ing not long after we met and, at flahmen Gathering time, we Bespoke one another and, just before Festival time, we were married.
Perhaps all this time I was hoping that starting a home of my own would erase my longing for Earth and perhaps Thann hoped the same thing. The Home offered him almost all he wanted and he had a job he loved. He felt the pioneering thrill of making a new world and was contented. But my need didn't evaporate. Instead, it intensified. I talked it over with the Sorter for our Group (a Sorter cares for our emotional and mental problems) because I was beginning to hate-oh, not hate! That's such a poisonous thing to have festering in your mind. But my perspective was getting so twisted that I was making both myself and Thann unhappy. She Sorted me deftly and thoroughly-and I went home to Thann and he started training to develop his latent Motive ability. We both
knew we could well lose our lives trying to return to Earth, but we had to try. Anyway, I had to try, especially after I found out about Child Within. I told Thann and his face lighted up as I knew it would, but
"This ought to make a bond between you and The Home," he said. "Now you'll find unsuspected virtues in this land you've been spurning."
I felt my heart grow cold. "Oh, no, Thann!" I said. "Now more than ever we must go. Our child can't be born here. He must be of Earth. And I want to be able to enjoy this Child Within-"
"This is quite a Child Without," said Thann, tempering the annoyance in his voice by touching my cheek softly, "crying for a lollipop, Earth flavored. Ah, well!" He gathered me into his arms. "Hippity-hop to the candy shop!"
A high thin whistle signaled the first brush of Earth's atmosphere against our craft-as though Earth were reaching up to scrape tenuous incandescent fingers against our underside. I cleared my mind and concentrated on the effort ahead. I'm no Motiver, but Thann might need my strength before we landed.
Before we landed! Setting down on the flat again, under Old Baldy! And seeing them all again! Valancy and Karen and the Francher Kid. Oh, the song the Kid would be singing would be nothing to the song my heart would be singing! Home! Child Within! Home again! I pressed my hands against the swell of Child Within. Pay attention I admonished. Be ready for your first consciousness of Earth. "I won't look," I told myself. "Until we touch down on the flat. I'll keep my eyes shut!" And I did.
So when the first splashing crash came, I couldn't believe it. My eyes opened to the sudden inrush of water and I was gasping and groping in complete bewilderment trying to find air. "Thann! Thann!" I was paddling awkwardly, trying to keep my head above water. What had happened? How could we have so missed the Canyon-even as inexperienced a Motiver as Thann was? Water? Water to drown in, anywhere near the Canyon?
There was a gulp and the last bubble of air belched out of our turning craft. I was belched out through a jagged hole along with the air.
Thann! Thann! I abandoned vocal calling and spread my cry clear across the band of subspeech. No reply-no reply! I bobbed on the surface of the water, gasping. Oh Child, stay Within. Be Careful. Be Careful! It isn't time yet. It isn't time!
I shook my dripping hair out of my eyes and felt a nudge against my knees. Down I went into darkness, groping, groping-and found him! Inert, unresponsive, a dead weight in my arms. The breathless agony of struggle ended in the slippery mud of a rocky shore. I dragged him up far enough that his head was out of the water, listened breathlessly for a heartbeat, then, mouth to mouth, I breathed life back into him and lay gasping beside him in the mud, one hand feeling the struggle as his lungs labored to get back into rhythm. The other hand was soothing Child Within. Not now, not now! Wait-wait!
When my own breathing steadied, I tore strips off my tattered travel suit and bound up his head, staunching the blood that persistently threaded down from the gash above his left ear. Endlessly, endlessly, I lay there listening to his heart-to my heart-too weak to move him, too weak to move myself. Then the rhythm of his breathing changed and I felt his uncertain thoughts, questioning, asking. My thoughts answered his until he knew all I knew about what had happened. He laughed a ghost of a laugh.
"Is this untidy enough for you?" And I broke down and cried.
We lay there in mud and misery, gathering our strength. I started once to a slithering splash across the water from us and felt a lapping of water over my feet. I pulled myself up on one elbow and peered across at the barren hillside. A huge chunk of it had broken off and slithered down into the water. The scar was raw and ragged in the late evening sunshine.
"Where did it come from?" I asked, wonderingly. "All this water! And there is Baldy