“Like what?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic.
“Well.” Mother considered. “Why not something that would go along with being a Sensitive? You’re Gifted with that already. Choose something that has to do with Sensing things. Take metal or water or some Awareness like that. It might come in handy sometime, and you could map the springs or ore deposits for the Group. Your father has the forestry maps for this area, but the People haven’t mapped it yet.”
Well, the idea was better than nothing, so that evening Mother helped me review the Awareness of water and metal and I set my mind to Group Memory that night so by morning I had a pretty good idea of the Basics of the job. It’d take years really to be an expert, but I could play around with it for the rest of the summer.
Water wasn’t scarce enough in Cayuse Canyon to make looking for it much fun, though I loved the little blind stream I found in a cave above the creek, so I tried the metal Awareness and got pretty adept by the evening of the first day. Adept, that is, at finding campers’ dumps and beef cans-which isn’t much to brag about. It’s like finding a telephone pole when you’re really looking for a toothpick.
By the end of the week, I had fined down my Sensing. Hovering a hundred feet or so over the surface, I had found an old, two-tined fork buried under two and a half feet of silt at the base of one of the Chimneys, and an ox shoe caught in a cleft of rock six feet above the creek on another of the Chimneys. Don’t ask me how it got there.
“Big deal!” Remy shoved the shoe with his finger when I showed the family my spoils after supper that night. “Both of them iron both manufactured. Big dealt”
I flushed and talked right back at him as I practically never do. “How far did you move the world today, wise guy? Was that the house I heard roaring past me this afternoon or a matchbox you managed to tilt off the table?”
Which was hardly fair of me because he was having a lot of trouble with his Motiving and had got his reactions so messed up that he could hardly lift anything now. Sort of a centipede trying to watch his feet when he walks. The trouble would clear up, of course, with further training, but Remy’s not the patient type.
“Who’s a wise guy?” Before I knew it, I was pressed against the ceiling, the light fixture too hot near the back of my neck.
“Remy!” Mother cried out. “Not at the table!”
“Put her down.” Father didn’t raise his voice, but I was tumbled back so fast that the hem of my skirt caught the flower bowl and nearly pulled it off the table.
“I’m sorry.” Remy glared at his clenched hands on the table and shut us all out so completely that we all blinked, and he kept us out all the rest of the evening.
He hardly said good-by when he left next morning, kicking petulantly at the top of the pinyon tree by the gate as he went by. Mother and Father looked at each other and shook their heads like parents and Father folded his mouth like a father and I was sorry I had started the whole thing-though I’m not sure I did.
I had fun all day. I was so absorbed in sorting out the different junk I Sensed that I lost track of time and missed lunch completely. When I checked the shadows for the time, it was long past the hour and I was too far to bother with going home. I wanted to finish this part of the Chimneys before going home anyway. So I sighed and filled my empty stomach with fresh cold spring water and took off again, enjoying the sweep of wind that brushed my hair back from my neck and dried the perspiration.
Well, concentration paid off! Around about four o’clock I sensed a metal deep inside the last of the towering Chimneys. Or the first one, depending on which mountain you started counting from. Anyway, I sensed a metal near the base of the last one—and not iron and not manufactured! Excitedly I landed on the flank of the mountain and searched out the exact spot. I tore my shirt and scratched my cheek and broke two fingernails before I found the spot in the middle of a brush pile. I traced with my finger the short, narrow course. Wire gold. Six feet inside the solid rock beneath me. Almost four inches of it, as thick as a light bulb filament! I laughed at my own matchbox I’d tilted off the table, but I was pleased anyway. It was small, for sure, but I’d found it, hadn’t I? From over a hundred feet up?
It was getting late and I was two-meal hungry, so I lifted up to the top of the last Chimney and teetered on its crumbling granite capstone to check my directions. I could short-cut home in a fraction of the time I’d taken to get here. The panorama laid out at my feet was so breathtakingly lovely that I could hardly leave it, but I finally launched myself in the direction of home. I cut diagonally away from the Chimneys, headed for the notch in the hills just beyond the old Selkirk mine. Half unconsciously I checked off metal as I passed above it. It was all ABC easily detected stuff like barbwire fence, tin can, roofing, barrel hoop-all with the grating feeling that meant rust.
Then suddenly there it was in my Awareness-slender and shiny and smooth and complicated! I checked in mid-air and circled. Beer can, wire fence, horseshoe-slender and shiny and smooth and not iron! I slid to a landing on the side of the mountain. What could it be? A water tank? Some mining equipment? But it was unrusted, sleek and shiny and slender. But how tall? If only I knew a little about sizes and contents. I could tell sizes of things I was familiar with, but not of this thing. I lifted and circled till I caught it again and narrowed my circle smaller and smaller until I was hovering. Over the old Selkirk mine. I grimaced, disappointed, and Sensed, a little annoyed, the tangly feeling of all the odds and ends of silver left in the fifty-years-abandoned old mine, and the traces of a lot of other metals I didn’t know yet. Then I sighed. Must have misinterpreted, but big and shiny, smooth and complicated-that’s what it still felt like to me. Nasty break. Back to the Differentiations again, girl!
My hunger hurried my lifting for home so much that I had to activate my personal shield to cut the wind.
Before I even got in sight of the ranger station where we were spending our summer in our yearly required shift for the Group, I felt Remy calling for me. Well, maybe not me by name, but he was needing comfort in large quantities and who better than his shadow to give it to him. So I zeroed in on our walnut tree and stumbled to a stop just behind him as he sat hunched morosely over himself.
“I’m grounded,” he said. “Ron says not to come back until I’m Purged. Father says I can start clearing brush out of the campsites tomorrow.”
“Oh, Remy!” I cried, dismayed for his unhappiness. “Why?”
He grinned unhappily. “Ron says I can’t learn as long as I’m trying to learn for the wrong reason.”
“Wrong reason?” I asked.
“Yeah. He said I don’t want to be a Motiver just to be a Motiver. I want to learn to be one so I can show people up, like Father and you and the O1d Ones. He says I don’t want to get into Space because of any real interest in Space, but because I’m mad at The People for not telling the world they can do it right now if they want to. He says-” Remy pulled a double handful of grass with sharp, unhappy yanks “-he says he has no intention of teaching
