“Because the Power has said to go. We are given time to go back to the machines. The Power is swinging the gateway to the stars open to us. We must take the gift and do what we can with it. We have no right to deprive our children of any of the years they might have left to them.”
After David relayed the message to ‘Chell, she clenched both her fists tight up against her anguished heart and cried, “We can’t! Oh, David! We can’t! We can’t leave the Home for-for-nowhere! Oh, David!” And she clung to him, wetting his shoulder with her tears.
“We can do what we must do,” he said. “All of the People are sharing this sorrow so none of us must make the burden any heavier for the others. The children learn their courage from us, ‘Chell. Be a good teacher.” He rocked her close-pressed head, his hand patting her tumbled hair, his troubled eyes seeking mine.
“Mother-” David began-Eva-lee was for every day.
“Mother, it seems to me that the Presence is pushing us out of the Home deliberately and crumpling it like an empty eggshell so we can’t creep back into it. We have sprouted too few feathers on our wings since the Peace. I think we’re being pushed off the branch to make us fly. This egg has been too comfortable.” He laughed a little as he held ‘Chell away from him and dried her cheeks with the palms of his hands.
“I’m afraid I’ve made quite an omelet of my egg analogy, but can you think of anything really new that we have learned about Creation in our time.”
“Well,” I said, searching my mind, pleased immeasurably to hear my own thoughts on the lips of my son. “No, I can honestly say I can’t think of one new thing.”
“So if you were Called to the Presence right now and were asked, ‘What do you know of My Creation?’ all you could say would be ‘I know all that my Befores knew-my immediate Befores, that is-I mean, my father’” David opened his hands and poured out emptiness. “Oh, Mother! What we have forgotten! And how content we have been with so little!”
“But some other way.” ‘Chell cried. “This is so-so drastic and cruel!”
“All baby birds shiver,” said David, clasping her cold hands. “Sprout a pin feather, ‘Chell!”
And then the planning arrived at the point where work could begin. The sandal shops were empty. The doors were closed in the fabric centers and the ceramic workrooms. The sunlight crept unshadowed again and again across the other workshops and weeds began tentative invasions of the garden plots.
Far out in the surrounding hills, those of the People who knew how hovered in the sky, rolling back slowly the heavy green cover of the mountainsides, to lay bare the metal-rich underearth. Then the Old Ones, making solemn mass visits from Group to Group, quietly concentrated above the bared hills and drew forth from the very bones of the Home, the bright, bubbling streams of metal, drew them forth until they flowed liquidly down the slopes to the workplaces-the launching sites. And the rush and the clamor and the noise of the hurried multitudes broke the silence of the hills of the Home and sent tremors through all our windows-and through our shaken souls.
I often stood at the windows of our home, watching the sky-pointing monsters of metal slowly coming to form. From afar they had a severe sort of beauty that eased my heart of the hurt their having-to-be caused. But it was exciting! Oh, it was beautifully exciting! Sometimes I wondered what we thought about and what we did before we started all this surge out into space. On the days that I put in my helping hours on the lifting into place of the strange different parts that had been fashioned by other Old Ones from memories of the Befores, the upsurge of power and the feeling of being one part of such a gigantic undertaking, made me realize that we had forgotten without even being conscious of it, the warmth and strength of working together. Oh, the People are together even more than the leaves on a tree or the scales on a dolfeo, but working together? I knew this was my first experience with its pleasant strength. My lungs seemed to breathe deeper. My reach was longer, my grasp stronger. Odd, unfinished feelings welled up inside me and I wanted to do. Perhaps this was the itching of my new pin feathers. And then, sometimes when I reached an exultation that almost lifted me off my feet, would come the weakness, the sagging, the sudden desire for tears and withdrawal. I worried, a little, that there might come a time when I wouldn’t be able to conceal it.
The Crossing had become a new, engrossing game for the children. At night, shivering in the unseasonable weather, cool, but not cold enough to shield, they would sit looking up at the glory-frosted sky and pick out the star they wanted for a new Home, though they knew that none they could see would actually be it. Eve always chose the brightest pulsating one in the heavens and claimed it as hers. Davie chose one that burned steadily but faintly straight up above them. But when Lytha was asked, she turned the question aside and I knew that any star with Timmy would be Home to Lytha.
Simon usually sat by himself, a little withdrawn from the rest, his eyes quiet on the brightness overhead.
“What star is yours, Simon?” l asked one evening, feeling intrusive but knowing the guard he had for any words he should not speak.
“None,” he said, his voice heavy with maturity. “No star for me.”
“You mean you’ll wait and see?” I asked.
“No,” said Simon. “There won’t be one for me.”
My heart sank. “Simon, you haven’t been Called, have you?”
“No,” said Simon. “Not yet. I will see a new Home, but I will be Called from its sky.”
“Oh, Simon,” I cried softly, trying to find a comfort for him. “How wonderful to be able to See a new Home!”
“Not much else left to See,” said Simon. “Not that has words.” And I saw a flare of Otherside touch his eyes. “But Gramma, you should see the Home when the last moment comes! That’s one of the things I have no words for.”
“But we will have a new Home, then,” I said, going dizzily back to a subject I hoped I could comprehend. “You said-“
“I can’t See beyond my Calling,” said Simon. “I will see a new Home. I will be Called from its strange sky. I can’t See what is for the People there. 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
